Entries in Life

I’m in New Orleans this week for my brother-in-law’s wedding. Whether you drive or fly into New Orleans, you quickly realize that it is surrounded by a lot of water. This realization is more dramatic if you drive since there are 10s of miles of swampland dotted with fishing camps to cross. And, with Katrina in mind, the first time visitor is going to be overwhelmed by all the water and wonder once again: Why do they live here? Katrina seems to creep into conversation every day even between people who live here year round. The swath of destruction it left behind is still visible and a part of everyone’s life. But, for those of us who have family here, it isn’t any wonder why they stay. Families in New Orleans shared the fate of the ancient Oak trees that live throughout the city. When I returned to New Orleans for the first time after Katrina, the Oak trees in Audubon Park were obviously damaged. Some had been ripped apart and killed. But many, even though many of their branches had been stripped away, remained and sprouted new growth. Families may have been ripped apart, many have been spread to Houston, Atlanta and Baton Rouge, but many have decided to stay and stay together. More than the jobs (most of which were on hold for months or just plain disappeared), families are what keep people here.

Tuesday, I found out my (analog) bathroom scales were misadjusted and I got five free pounds of weightloss. Yay! Shortly, I’ll be below 200lbs. FINALLY! Earlier in the week, I took another reading from the sphygmomanometer at the pharmacy and it confirmed previous readings. I’m consistently below 120/80 — that is, I’m in the “Normal” range. Finally, waking up at 6:00 every morning and going on my ride helps me wake up and be ready to attack the day. I feel great, even if I’m not actually experiencing a burst of productivity.

I finally understand where this myth is coming from. John Walker of The Hacker’s Diet (and so much more) is the source. Under “What, Me Exercise?” he lists various activities and the calories burned. Bicycling gets 300/hr while jogging gets 700/hr. Now, if you don’t put out any effort and spend a lot of time coasting along, then, yes, you may as well walk for your exercise. The Final Sprint offers this:

The standard comparison is that one mile of running equals four miles of cycling, but that’s lousy science. Although running requires the same amount of energy per mile at any speed (110 calories per mile), riding is affected by wind resistance so the faster you ride, the more energy you use. So you have to compare running and cycling at different cycling speeds.

Which makes a ton of sense. Now, take this “activity calculator” and compare 90 minutes of cycling at around 13mph (~1100 calories) to 90 minutes of running at 6mph (~1400 calories). We’re not accounting for hills here (which changes things considerably) so this doesn’t reflect the actual number of calories being burned on my ride, but it’s a good estimate. Still, the comparision of 1400 to 1100 isn’t quite as dramatic as John Walker’s chart would have you believe. It is only a quarter more calories instead of double the amount. Come on, people! Trust, but verify! The Hacker’s Diet is a great resource, the excercise portion, at least, has some funny numbers. (I know, he probably got his numbers from somewhere else and that source is wrong, but two people I know who’ve read John Walker’s book have claimed running burns “a lot more” calories than cycling, so I suspect the book is the source of their misinformation.)

(via Jim’s shared items feed)

It has long seemed to me that there are really just two religions in the world, and they show up in each tradition: one runs on risk/ welcome/ abandon/ grace/ transformation/ forgiveness/ creativity/ multiple-possibilities; and the other, on security/ control/ rules/ order/ stability/ only-one-possibility. – Two Religions

This does seem to be a theme that shows up a lot. But I would argue that it is possible to fuse the two strains of thinking. It is hard. It is very difficult to be at once about rules and grace; transformation and order do not easily co-exist, but it is possible to have both. The Orthodox are obviously all about order and stability. There are also, if you can handle them, a lot of rules. But I’ve only seen “control” and “only-one-possibility” from one very bad priest. He was young and a convert, though, so it is easy (for me) to forgive him. Instead, I’ve seen an abundance of grace and forgiveness within the Church. And not just at the parish level. It seems to be throughout the fathers. I won’t go so far as to say that welcome, creativity, or multiple-possibilities is widespread in the Church, but then, I don’t see a lot of emphasis on security and control.

That is all. (Ok, so I realize some of you will need some more information. Brad Fitzpatrick, with Danga and now SixApart, is pretty amazing when it comes to the software he’s developed and released to the public. These range from utilities to provide secure backups on hardware you don’t own (brackup) distributed job schedulers (The Schwartz) and others I’ve written about. Note for you Perl-bashers that he did much of this in Perl.)

As I mentioned Last night, I spent last week setting up an Asterisk server and writing a simple proof-of-concept using Adhearsion, a Ruby MVC framework for managing calls. I wrote up a HOWTO for Adhearsion that covers a few things not covered in the Adhearsion “Getting Started” tutorial — things that may be of interest to people completely new to Asterisk (like me) such as some simple SIP routing, where to find a phone number that will dial into your Asterisk box for free, and some basic networking issues that you need to be aware of when setting up Asterisk on a NAT’d network. Programming Asterisk is fun. Now I can be the guy setting up mindless phone trees and irritating callers! Seriously, it is fun. Access to phones is more wide-spread than access to web-browsers so you can potentially reach more poeple. In the tech-scarce regions that I’ll be writing software for soon, this is important.

What I Like

Adhearsion does make it relatively easy to set up call rules.The framework takes a lot of the drudgery out and Adhearsion scripts are more straight-forward than the cryptic Asterisk extentions.conf file. The #adhearsion IRC channel isn’t the most active channel I’ve seen, but the maintainers of the software do show up there and help out if you ask questions. Since the call management portion of relatively simple, I was able to throw something together really quickly without thinking too much about how to do it. In fact, most of the how time was spent on networking and Asterisk.

What I Didn’t Like

Well, there is quite a bit. So lets get started.

Asterisk

There don’t appear to be any simple step-by-step HOWTOs for Asterisk. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — you should not need a cookbook to take care of a system on a day-to-day basis. But for people just starting out, or for best practices when you encounter a new problem, this sort of thing would really help out. AstriskNow (the distribution Adhearsion prefers, at least for the Getting Started guide) takes care of a lot of the setup, so that is good, but as soon as you step out beyond the lovely confines of the web-based control panel (say, to create a simple zip-code lookup service), you can kiss much of that simplicity good-bye.

SIP Knowlege Required

Beyond just Asterisk, you have to know SIP — at least some basic information. I didn’t know how SIP lookups worked. I knew SIP had a designated port, but I didn’t know about how it worked with RTP. I found most of this out, but it was sniffing the wire using WireShark and tcpdump. I would have prefered a nice step-by-step HOWTO or, at least, a heads-up. Still, I learned a lot that I might not have learned otherwise.

The “Ruby on Rails” Mindset

Look, I appreciate simplicity as much as the next guy. I appreciate that you think Ruby is the best invention since the wheel. But I already have my favorite tools. Telling me that your ORM takes twice as long to do things as doing it myself doesn’t mean your ORM is “FAST!”. It means it is slow and unoptimized. Furthermore, the creators of Ruby on Rails (RoR) specifically say they want you to Grow Out of their products. Apparently, they are more interested in generating hype as a way to make money than in building robust, scalable software. Now, this might not seem that important, but Adhearsion uses many of the framework elements from RoR.

Documentation

The documentation for Adhearsion is pretty anemic. Yes, they have a great getting started document. Yes, they have alpha software (not “very beta” as the site says). But the documentation for moving beyond the initial examples isn’t that great. I’m sure they’ll improve it, so this is a pretty minor complaint.

Community

The mailing list for Adhearsion is quiet as is the IRC channel. People are there, true, but there just aren’t a lot of them.

Development Status

This is another minor complaint. I understand the software is still pretty alpha at the moment. But it is pretty alpha. If I’m going to start working in a new area (i.e. Asterisk Development) doesn’t it make sense to use tools that I’m familiar with rather than learning a new set of tools on an immature platform? At this point (version 0.8), Adhearsion contains around 3000 lines of code. I’m tempted to go write my own framework in my favorite language and see how it holds up.

Conclusion

I like the idea of Adhearsion. Asterisk is very compelling, even if it isn’t the most intuitive thing in the world. I just wish things were farther along.

I could feel it last night as I went to bed. I’m exhausted from these three days of riding. I’ll take the next two days off. Supposably, this week I’ve burned around 4000 calories. And when I weighed myself this AM, I had gained a pound! I’ll haven’t increased my caloric intake (as far as I can tell), but I suppose I need to look at restricting it if my goal is to lose some weight. Status quo must not be maintained.

I set up Asterisk last week and hooked it up to Adhearsion, a Ruby-based MVC for handling phone calls. You can try it out by calling 641-237-7272 (yes, that’s an Iowa number.) There isn’t much there are it is mostly just proof of concept. I’ll write up my opinion on Adhearsion tomorrow, but, for now, I like how well this worked.

According to the calorie calculators, and assuming I haven’t changed my caloric intake, I will have burned enough calories cycling around Lancaster county to have lost one pount tomorrow. Which is to say I put in my 20 miles today.

It is quite possible to look at the universe and come to a conclusion that there is no God. I have always marveled at this … sometimes wondering why it is not other than it is. And yet I am convinced that it is in the very humility of God that things are the way they are. It would have been quite possible to have walked by the cross of Christ and assumed there was just one more Jew dying on a cross. — Fr. Stephen

This really struck me. Christian Appologetics seems to take a materialistic, rationalistic approach: “These things are absolutely true and, as a result, you must believe.” But if we are honest, there is no such proof. There is no one thing that I can point to that will convince anyone that what I believe is true. And my experience with God isn’t going to satisfy anyone who chooses not to believe.