Entries in Life

Last year, I was excited about two documentaries: The Singing Revolution and As We Forgive. Both of these movies offer alternative ways to see the world. The Singing Revolution is a revolution unimaginable to most Americans. Most of us cannot imagine freedom without blood. Especially as we’re in the midst of a war, surrounded by “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers, revolution without bloodshed seems, well, crazy. Crazy enough that a small documentary about one has done pretty well in theatres this past year and managed a place on the marquee amongst larger studios blockbusters. You may not have heard of it, but that isn’t because it didn’t come to a theatre near you. Likewise, As We Forgive is an alternative path to justice. The movie tells the path some Rwandans chose after Genocide, after Gacaca courts, after the system had done everything it could. It tells the story of genocideers working to rebuild homes of their victims. The can’t bring back the families they killed, but they can ask forgivess. Sometimes, the victims can even forgive. This stands in stark contrast to most American’s sense of justice, where we can only imagine victim families giving victim impact statements in a court room, never living in a house built by, and next door to, their husband’s murderer. And as a new year starts, I discovered a new documentary project that I can get excited about. God’s Garden is a documentary about the one man’s discovery of genuine African Christianity. Not “white man’s religion”, but a Christianity that came to Africa before Europeans even knew it existed. An Ethiopian priest introduces him to St Moses and it changes his life. I love documentaries like this. They challenge our view of the world and suggest that, yes, there is another way, a way of peace, forgiveness, change, and love. This is a good reminder when the way we so often choose is with violence, retribution, stasis, and resentment.

It’s probably time for me to get some riding glasses. I can still see well enough, but I really should be wearing glasses when I ride. Things tend to be a little blurry and, at night, light from cars tends to starburst. I’m making good progress on my goal, but then, it is only the first week. I need to average 120 miles a week, but that means I have to start now. And, unless I decide to take long lunches, that means riding in the dark. Last night, I rode. I was halfway through with my ride when I felt light-headed — like my blood sugar was low. I should have stopped and gotten something to eat but I kept on. (Note to self: this is very dangerous, don’t do it again.) Last night, I spent some time scaring myself — imagining that I had passed out coming down a hill with a car behind me. As if that weren’t enough, my front light got lost. I was trying to adjust it and the whole thing fell apart on the rode. Finding a light in the dark? Good luck! Oh well, I know the road and I had enough presense of mind to watch oncoming traffic. My back light was flashing away, still, and I wear some reflective clothing so it wasn’t as if I was completely invisible. But the ride cost me a day. I am recovering from some sore muscles and thinking about riding without dizziness. (Oh, and winter cycling clothes. Others have more experience, but a balaclava, some thermal underwear and that cycling jersey are great even into the 20s.)

Since emacs on Linux can use DBus calls now, I wrote a short notify.el as a demonstration to myself and to save myself from forking notify-send (because, uh, forking is bad) whenever someone mentions my nick in IRC. There is a delay built into it so that your “friends” on IRC can’t DDOS you with notifications. Oh, the really nifty thing about this is the function keywords-to-properties. elisp keywords (:example) allow you to fake named parameters in function calls. This is done a couple of different places in Emacs, the most visible being defcustom. But there isn’t any universal way that I could find to parse the keyword-value pairs into something usable. So I cribbed from defcustom and wrote something that I hope will be useful to others.

I seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time editting MediaWiki wikis, so I’ve had some time to put together a better MediaWiki mode for emacs. In the process, I wrote some code that many people (myself included) seem to think Emacs needs. HTTP POSTing in native elisp is too hard right now, so a http-post-simple.el was written. The original mediawiki.el required this library, but it wasn’t included. I refactored the dependency away and now I have some form parsing functions in elisp that I can contribute back to the Emacs core. Anyway, if you use Emacs and edit MediaWiki pages, check out mediawiki.el and let me know what you think. I’m especially interested in bug reports from anyone.

For all my friends out there running WordPress weblogs, please consider installing the Super Cache plugin. A friend of mine runs a very popular website — 1000s of unique visitors a day — and on part of the site he has a WordPress weblog. Traffic hitting the front page was bringing the server to its knees. There were 50 Apache processes waiting on MySQL to do something. I tried changing the query cache size in MySQL and adding caching headers in Apache, plus random other things. Nothing seemed to help. Then I installed Super Cache. Even before I made it though the multi-step process to fully enable it, the server was recovering. Super Cache created a static copy of the front page for Apache to serve and that made all the difference. Makes me wonder why WordPress doesn’t create a static cache in the first place.

There is a first for everything. This year, for the first time, I’m going to announce some goals I have for 2009. Before this, if I set any goals for myself, I kept them to myself. This year, I think these goals are reasonably achievable and announcing them will give me more incentive to actually do them.

• Ride at least 6000 miles: Last year I road 3000 miles. I started in late April and took a month or three off after that. This year, I can do better. I doubt you should expect more than 6000 in 2010, but anything is possible.
• Lose another 20lbs: One year ago, I weighed myself at 212lbs. At my height, that is “obese” according to BMI. Before that I had been up to around 220lbs. I’m down around 190lbs now and hit a low of 180 this year. I’d like to lose another 15 to 20lbs and end up around 170. And while exercise, like all that cycling I’ve been doing, is healthy, I actually lost most of the weight before I began biking. My secret? The Hacker’s Diet. Essentially: your body is a machine that consumes calories and burns them off or stores them as fat. If you want to lose fat, consume fewer calories.
• Become a Debian Developer: I use Ubuntu and Debian on almost all the machines I set up. I recently got a couple of packages sponsored into Debian — and have already fielded the first bug report. At work, I help develop and package open source software. I think I can make some great contributions to Debian and Debian Medical in particular. (I wrote more about this on the work blog.)
• Start teaching my children to program: I wrote about this two years ago but never did it. Part of it was a lack of preparation and material on my part and a lack of interest on theirs. My son just turned 10 and has begun to show an interest in the work I do. My oldest daughter is almost 12 and should know some basics. And I should take some time out to focus on this sort of activity with them. I’ve been going over the problems on Project Euler and I think some of those problems are simple enough to start with. As an added bonus, they’ll learn some math concepts. I think I’ll set up Squeak on their laptops to teach them.
• Go the whole year without buying a TV: My wife threw out the TV last month. It was probably inevitable anyway since we were completely analog and don’t even have basic cable — in February we would have been stuck with the DVDs we had sitting around. This doesn’t mean we’re without video entertainment — laptops and a DVD system in the minivan take care of that — but it does mean that no one is asking to turn on the TV or play the PlayStation. When she first threw out the TV, there wasn’t even any moaning from the kids. TV was nice to have, but no one needed it. My wife even said she felt less stressed without the TV around.

That seems like a good way to start off the new year. What are your goals?