Xor News

Mamacita made paella last night and it was truly fantastic. It was very authentic, real spanish short grained rice, chorizo, jamon, shrimp, scallops, chicken, smoked Spanish paprika, saffron. There is a certain kind of pepper that true Valencian paella would have that we didn’t find in time, but I’m thinking that just gives us an excuse to have it again pretty soon, right? Right?

Paella de Valencia

So here it is, probably enough paella for 12 people. My new favorite food has displaced Maryland crab-cakes from the top of the list.

The boy wonder graduates! Way to go, d00d!

The Boy Wonder Graduates

This screen cast covers Scaling Rails apps using Rack and Metal and is an execellent tutorial on both subjects. Jason Pollack, one of the Rails Envy guys, does a superb job explaining how rack and metal work in Rails 2.3.

Last night we concluded watching the DVD of the Does God Exist? debate between William Lane Craig (affirm) and Christopher Hitchens (deny). The debate was sponsored by the Biola University apologetics department and took place on the Biola campus in Southern California. The debate format was classical and some questions were taken from the student section of the audience at the end.

I have read several of Dr. Craig’s books before and have enjoyed them, especially on Jesus Resurrection, Fact or Figment?, a debate in book form with Gerd Ludemann.

We appreciated many of the points made during the debate on both sides. One can particularly sympathize with Mr. Hitchens comments on the banality of man-made religion and the damage, heart-break, and destruction it has caused. It is sad that so many have done so much evil in the name of Christianity. The earthly church attempting to gain political power and be able to “tell people what to do in the name of God” we find a particularly repugnant form of man-made addition to true Christianity. But as Dr. Craig concludes, we ultimately believe Christianity and that there is a God because it is true, not because of the potential or actual benefits to society from holding this world-view.

Debate video highly recommended.

Reading an interesting paper on d-Left Hashing (pdf link) by Bonomi, Mitzenmacher, et. al. This is a space and effeciency improvement on Bloom filters. Wondering how it could be incorporated into a Hadoop mapfile to avoid scanning compressed blocks for keys that aren’t present. Maybe the work in hbase on o.a.h.hbase.io.BloomFilterMapFile would provide good clues. Need to understand the dynamic bit reassignment stuff first though.

I lost the entire blog today with a carelessly placed argument to
‘rm -rf’. Ironically I was trying to delete some old backups of
this blog. It turned out I deleted everything.

Most of it was restored from backup. Some few pictures are still
missing though.

I am an Emacs weenie. I really can’t get much work done without emacs. I
have tried other things.

* vi/vim – I can use it and I try to learn a new command every once in a
while
* Textmate – mkay. But I like Emacs. Plus Emacs is free.
* Visual Slick Edit – The parts that are like Emacs are nice. Emacs is
free.
* Netbeans – Almost can be configured to work like Emacs.
* Eclipse – No. I. Just. Can’t. Do. It. Very. Sorry.

So I am making this post from Emacs. Carbon Emacs 22.1 on Mac OS X.
Using weblogger mode. It turned out to be easy. The hard part was
figuring out what the “endpoint URL” was supposed to be
(/blog/xmlrpc.php for this Wordpress blog). And enabling the Markdown
plugin. Yeah, that was tricky — had to click a checkbox.

See ya later lame textarea edit box and lame wordpress markup style. We
hardly knew ye.

Some quotes from things I have recently found insightful or helpful.

The state of marriage is one that requires more virtue and constancy than any other. It is a perpetual exercise of mortification. From this thyme plant, in spite of the bitter nature of its juice, you may be able to draw and make the honey of a holy life. — Francis de Sales

Marriage is the operation by which a woman’s vanity and a man’s egotism are extracted without anesthetic. — Helen Rowland

Marriage is the greatest test in teh world…but now I welcome the test instead of dreading it. It is much more than a test of sweetness of temper, as people sometimes think; it is a test of the whole character and affects every action. — T.S. Eliot

One of the best wedding gifts God gave you was a full-length mirror called your spouse. Had there been a card attached, it would have said "Here’s to helping you discover what you’re really like!" — Gary and Betsy Ricucci

If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless– it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. — C.S. Lewis

Christian marriage presumes a certain degree of self-disclosure…This reality can be terrifying to contemplate. Dating is largely a dance in which you always try to put your best face forward–hardly a good preparation for the inevitable self-disclosure implied in marriage. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if many marriages end in divorce largely because one or both partners are running from their own revealed weaknesses as much as they are running from something they can’t tolerate in their spouse. — Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage

A man who says "I’ve never loved you" is a man who is saying essentially this: "I’ve never acted like a Christian." — Gary Thomas, ibid.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it. — God, The Bible, Ephesians 5:25

We are starting to use thrift and needed an ant build recipe. Here’s what we came up with. It works good and the only thing that looks like an abstraction leakage to me is that I needed to know the package, the java namespace, for the resultant generated thrift code and the name of one of the thrift generated files. The primary goal was to eliminate running the thrift generator when the generated code is newer than the .thrift files. There isn’t a one to one mapping between .thrift files and generated output so if any of the generated stuff is newer than any of the thrift then it all gets recreated.

I also didn’t want to have to copy the thrift output to someplace else, so a javac target was added to just treat the “gen-java” thrift output as a new source directory for direct java compilation. The normal ant target to compile the java code can now just depend on “thrift-gen”.

  <property name="thrift.dir" value="${basedir}/src/thrift"/>
  <property name="thrift.out.dir" value="${basedir}/src/gen-java"/>
  <property name="thrift.package" value="your/package/name"/>

  <!-- thrift files -->
  <fileset id="thrift.files" dir="${thrift.dir}">
    <include name="**/*.thrift"/>
  </fileset>
  <!-- Determint if thrift generated java is up to date -->
  <target name="thrift-init">
    <dependset>
      <srcfileset refid="thrift.files"/>
      <targetfileset dir = "${thrift.out.dir}/${thrift.package}">
        <include name="**/*.java"/>
      </targetfileset>
    </dependset>
    <available file="${thrift.out.dir}/${thrift.package}/Foo.java"
               property="thrift.uptodate"/>
  </target>

  <!-- Generate thrift java -->
  <target name="thrift-gen" depends="thrift-init" unless="thrift.uptodate">
    <pathconvert property="thrift.file.list" refid="thrift.files"
               pathsep=" " dirsep="/">
    </pathconvert>
    <echo message="Running thrift generator on ${thrift.file.list}"/>
    <exec executable="thrift" dir="${basedir}" failonerror="true">
      <arg line="--strict --gen java -o src ${thrift.file.list}"/>
    </exec>
  </target>

This quote is from a lovely little volume by John Urquhart titled The Wonders of Prophecy, or, What Are We To Believe?. The book is not dated, but seems to be from the early 1900’s.

There are few truths which have not had to run the guantlet of controversy: and those truths are our possession today solely because there happened to be men who, while they loved peace, would not part with conviction though the holding to it meant war. Science as well as faith has had its martyrs. They were brave enough to leave the beaten track in search of truth; and, when they found it, they were not to be frightened from their possession by the chorus of doubt and condemnation with which they were assailed. That man will do little in the world who can be terrified by clamour, or who surrenders convictions because all are not agreed as to their truth. The manly man feels that, in such differences, there is a call to inquire and to make his own decision. The rest, though it pains one to say it, are no great loss. The wind that sweeps across the threshing-floor takes only the chaff away; or, if it take with it too the light, withered, heartless, grain, the wheat that is left clean and sound is all the worthier of the garner.

Seems applicable to a lot of the goings on in the intelligent-design community, the vitriolic spewage from the new militant atheists, and lots of other current events at the intersection of true religion with the public square, true religion and science, true and false religion, and most people’s seeming apathetic lack of conviction and clear individual thinking on or about anything.