C-Mike Run (Good Mike)

Kickin' Pandas, by the numbers

2011-11-17T19:24:00.000-05:00

This past Saturday, I had to say goodbye to another great youth soccer team. The parting was bittersweet. The team had just won the Fall 2011 Harrisburg Parks & Recreation U7 tournament and was all smiles and yells and gold medals and good ol' kid energy. But after sharing the past 14 weeks together (and with several of the players returning from previous seasons, too), it's difficult to see a season come to an end — even such a great end.

I like numbers, so here's a quick snapshot of our season in numbers:

10 players on the team
1 extremely helpful assistant coach
49 team-wide emails I sent
10 regular season matches played (9 wins, 0 losses, and 1 draw)
4 post-season matches played (4 wins, 0 losses, and 0 draws)
3 goals allowed
43 goals scored
10 players (out of 10) who scored at least one goal
6 (out of 140 possible) match absences
0 injuries

Of course, numbers don't tell the whole story. My 5- and 6-year-old Kickin' Pandas were truly a fun and talented bunch of young athletes, with energetic and supportive parents who provided the best practice and match attendance rate I've ever seen. This team challenged me as a coach to keep raising the bar for them as they successfully mastered skill after skill. As I tentatively introduced new drills and exercises — some of which I was half-convinced would never fly with some of the younger players — I was repeatedly surprised to find each player willing, excited, and able to learn the new techniques.

The more mature players learned not just to play the game mechanically, but strategically — you could observe them thinking beyond just "get the ball, take it up the field, and shoot". And while the less mature ones certainly had their moments of drifting attention spans, they were always ready and willing to engage on the field and give their very best. And my favorite factoid about the team? That every single player scored at least one goal this season.

Of course, as I coach, I learned alot this season, too. First, I learned not to underestimate what even very young players are able to learn. I also learned just how much of a difference it can make in a player's effort investment when they know their coach believes in them. (These might seem obvious to most folks; sometimes I'm a little slow to come around.)

Overall, the Kickin' Pandas were an amazing bunch of kids for whose hard work a championship medal seemed an appropriate reward. I am truly honored to have had the chance to get to know them and their families and to share my love of soccer with them. I hope to see them returning for season after season of youth soccer.

Upcoming Subversion 1.7 webinar

2011-09-12T13:57:00.003-04:00

In addition to getting to write about the forthcoming Subversion 1.7 release, I'll also get a chance to talk about it in an upcoming CollabNet webinar entitled "Subversion 1.7 — Why You Should Care". To sign up for this free webinar, visit the registration page below:

Subversion 1.7 — Why You Should Care
Date: September 20, 2011
Time: 9-10am US Pacific

Subversion 1.7 article at Dr. Dobbs

2011-09-12T13:52:00.005-04:00

I was recently given the chance to write an article for Dr. Dobbs about the forthcoming major release of the software that I spend my days (and some nights, too) working on. If you are interested in version control systems in general or Apache™ Subversion® specifically, or perhaps just enjoy long, dry reads about software used primarily by other software hackers, you can check out my article at http://drdobbs.com/open-source/231500282.

Kickin' Pandas

2011-09-09T15:21:00.004-04:00

Another season of soccer is upon us. Another batch of eager young athletes. Another few months of practices, matches, and all the hard work of preparing for both. And... another logo!

This year, my youngest son's team has black and white jerseys. Because of the recent popularity of the so-titled film around my house, we started off with the name "Kung Fu Pandas". But the re-use of a trademarked name was uncreative. So after consultation with my assistant coach, we rechristened the team as the Kickin' Pandas. (We did, however, keep the "1 ... 2 ... 3 ... skidoosh!" post-game chant!)

As usual, I started with a hand-drawn sketch. (The restaurant whose paper tablecloths I used to use for this task is now closed, so I had to settle for a sheet of notepad paper.)

From there, I went to work on the digitization step, using OpenOffice Draw as usual because I'm too much of an amateur and cheapskate to go with industry standard tools.

Then, an unexpected blessing: a fellow coach and friend in a different age bracket happened to choose the same name for her team, and was interested in getting iron-on patches made up, too. With her sharing the cost of the patches, the economics of the whole thing was no longer ridiculous. So we ordered the patches, which arrived today!

Thanks (yet again) to the folks at TJM (aka patches4less.com) for the great patch creation work!

The emotional sine wave of church volunteerism

2011-08-31T21:08:00.005-04:00

Tonight was one of those nights. Not universally grand; not universally challenging. Just back and forth between those extremes at a break-neck pace.

4:04pm: Leave home to head to church.

4:12pm: Hear a loud pop and see an unknown object fly out from behind my car.

4:13pm: Arrive at church, get music stuff setup for adult worship practice.

4:16pm: Begin moving drums, etc. over to the youth building for youth worship. Notice that my passenger side rear tire is completely flat.

4:35pm: Adult worship practice. My timing is way off this afternoon. Bummer.

5:10pm: Move self, guitar, and youth ministry laptop to youth building for youth music practice.

5:12pm: Youth ministry laptop has crashed. Now in an endless boot loop. No time to fix it—need to practice youth worship music with the others.

5:56pm: Youth worship practice was good, but we have no way to project song lyrics. Move guitar back to worship center for adult worship tonight. Arrange to borrow netbook from Pastor for youth music tonight.

6:02pm: Slam down a quick dinner. Encouraging comment from a church member about recent worship song selections.

6:15pm: Pastor delivers netbook. Download slides (which I'd fortunately stuffed onto a remote server before the youth ministry laptop died), carry to youth building, and setup for projection.

6:25pm: Back in worship center, ready for adult worship. Shoot! Forgot something on the netbook. Head back to youth building.

6:28pm: Final tweaks on netbook. Back to the worship center.

6:35pm: Help lead adult worship. (Great singing tonight, congregation!)

6:45pm: Back to youth building.

7:02pm: Help lead youth worship. (Great participation here, too. Sweet!)

7:30pm: Return netbook to Pastor. Change tire on my car with a friend.

7:42pm: Store guitar and music away.

7:46pm: Start cleaning up youth building music stuff. (Why did somebody leave a cooler with water in it in the youth room? Mildew experiment?)

8:24pm: Head home. Me, my sons, and my donut-sporting car.

Net emotional state, when it was all said and done: Quite positive. Stuff happens. Computers fail at the worst possible time—count on it. Tires blow. Schedule contention happens. And yet I was able to experience not just one group of people singing praises to God tonight, but two! That's enough to make it all right for me.

Special thanks to: Josh, for the extra hand with tire; Erica, Emily, and Camden, for the lovely youth music tonight; Jim, for the encouragement; John, for the netbook save; Mary and Sharon, for working around my schedule tonight; and Barbara, for keeping the whole lot of us sane.

Comets, by the numbers

2011-06-06T19:35:00.005-04:00

Tonight, my Spring 2011 U7 soccer team — the Comets — had its end-of-season celebration. We congregated at the local CiCi's pizza (which was very accommodating to our party of thirty or so, by the way) for some food and a trophy presentation. As part of the event, I shared some facts about our season in a "by the numbers" format:

13 weeks in the season
25 degrees Fahrenheit the maximum daily temperature rose over the course of the season
45 team-wide emails I sent
10 games played (5 wins, 2 losses, and 3 draws)
10 goals allowed
26 goals scored
10 players on the team
4 scorers
0 injuries

Personally, the highlights of the season are the ones not reflected in the numbers. It's been great to witness each player's improvement in terms of ball handling and understanding of the game. It's been great to share the coaching experience again with a close friend with a similar coaching philosophy. It's been great to see how my youngest son's love of the game and hard work has rubbed off on my oldest boy, providing the three Pilato guys another common interest.

Had I to do it again, would I change anything? Good grief, yes. That practice where the planned activity flopped and I didn't have a backup plan in mind already? Yeah, I'd do that differently. Those moments in heated matches where I didn't keep my cool? Yup, I'd just bench myself for those. My verbose evangelism on the coaches-only discussion forum about keeping the tournament focused on education rather than competition? Pretty sure those didn't earn me any friends. So, yeah. I'd change some things.

But my hope is that the kids were largely shielded from or oblivious to their coach's failures, and that next season, I'll be able to post one more statistic:

10 players returning to soccer from the Spring 2011 season

Happy birthday, Gavin, from an old geek to a new one

2011-06-03T23:50:00.005-04:00

My oldest son, Gavin, loves science and technology. His love is not just at a "video games are cool" or "I want an iPod because everyone else has one" level. It's much deeper, almost like just needing to know how the world works — by what rules does the Universe play, and how can we use our creativity to bend them? While his overactive imagination can sometimes be a source of conflict in the home (or in the restaurant, or church, or public restroom, or …), his mother and I do recognize the beauty of it.

Gavin turns eight years old in … well, in about two hours from now, technically. I was trying to think of something special I could do for him, when it occurred to me to use one of his favorite toys/tools — Lego® blocks — to create a portrait of him. At a design level, this isn't really so challenging. I mean, it only took moments to load up a recent photo of him into the GIMP, shrink it, posterize it, replace its palette with one based around primary colors, etc.

The result was a blocky image with Lego-ish colors whose aspect ratio had been adjusted to account for the fact that a 1x1 Lego block isn't square, but instead roughly 3:4:

No, the difficult part was in actually building the thing! Okay, not difficult so much as tedious. And of course, I failed to inventory my available blocks before starting, so it was on a wing and a prayer that the hours-long activity began. But in the end, every piece planned was in place (minus some black shadow blocks on the bottom I decided to omit), and the work was complete. I had a roughly 14" x 18" image of my son, made out of plastic, to present to him tomorrow as a surprise.

In our home, soccer is a staple (or, "Seeing God even when it hurts")

2011-05-23T15:42:00.009-04:00

[WARNING: Images that some might find disturbing follow.]

I had a great time last week in Berlin for Elego's Subversion Day event. I really like that city anyway, but to be able to hang out and code with so many of my fellow Subversion developers was just plain fun. Of course, the best part about any trip I take away from my family is when the trip is over. Well before my plane landed in Charlotte on Friday afternoon, I was already looking ahead: Saturday would bring my youngest son's soccer match as well as my own; Sunday held church and a church-wide picnic at a local park; and Monday was my oldest son's piano recital.

The first of those events was far more enjoyable than I even foresaw. My 5- and 6-year-old Comets played better than ever! Every last one of them was hungry for the ball, and it showed. They won their match 2-0, with my son scoring the first of the two goals. We had some time between that match and my own, so we celebrated with my friend and assistant coach Paul and his family at an area Japanese steakhouse. (Paul's son scored the other of the goals!) We've tried and failed to get together with this family several times recently, so it was nice to finally align schedules and enjoy the shared meal.

Now, my match was scheduled to begin at 8:30pm. Ordinarily, my wife and kids would not attend such a late match, as waking everyone up for church on Sunday morning is quite hard enough without us having the kids out at such late hours! But Paul's family was interested in taking in the match themselves, so my family opted to join them. It's always more enjoyable to play a sport when you have friends and family cheering for you, so this was a pleasant development. But it was at this point that the weekend took a turn for the unpleasant.

I play a central defender role for my team, and was more or less responsible for our opponents getting on the scoreboard first when I failed to intercept their striker's approach and ultimate shot. But then, a few minutes before half-time, it all got worse. Much worse. We conceded a corner kick to the other team, and when the kick came in, it came directly to me. I knew what was required: I had to head the ball away from frame and protect the goal. I did my job quite well this time. But unfortunately, our opponent's striker also went up for the header from behind me, and his eyebrow smashed into the back of my head. I didn't realize I was even injured. Someone said they saw blood, and I assumed it was that of the other guy. But as I turned to look, I felt that nasty warmth pouring down my face.

My team acted quickly to supply gauze and ice packs and even an unused jersey to mop up the mess that was pouring from my head. I wasn't lightheaded or suffering from a concussion — just gushing blood. The local urgent care centers were already closed for the night, so a half-hour later, I was in the emergency room. My wife Amy was with me, as was Paul, since neither Amy nor I was in any sort of shape to drive. My sons were with Paul's wife until Amy's parents could pick them up. Finally, four hours after the incident, I emerged with new hardware: six staples in the head.

Some would look at this event and see tragedy. My oldest son saw something worse: I had asked him to pray for my safety before the match, and he'd forgotten to do so. And I confess that there are times when a bit of anger at the other team's striker wells up inside me. But even as it was all unfolding, I have no choice but to see God's protection and an opportunity to give Him glory. My wife should have been home with our sleeping children, but she wasn't — she was with me. Paul should have been elsewhere (after all, he'd never been able to come to any other of my matches), but he wasn't — he was with me. Statistically speaking, you should have been reading some other web page instead of this blog post, but you aren't — you figure it out.

Oh! As for the rest of the weekend: I gratefully helped to lead worship at church as usual (on just a few hours of rest), the picnic was a ton of fun (minus one admittedly frightening moment when a wooden boomerang managed to find its misguided way into my shoulder blades), and I look forward to my son's recital less than two hours from now.

As for me and soccer? Well, we're going to have to slow our relationship down a bit over the next few weeks. But I look forward to stepping out onto the pitch again for the Fall season.

UPDATE (2011/05/24): My oldest son's piano recital went great! Both of my sons are goal-achieving winners!

Soccer logos for the big kids

2011-05-02T08:37:00.005-04:00

In the past several months, I've been given the opportunity to whip up another pair of logos for area soccer folk.

The first was for the adult football club-in-the-large in my town (Harrisburg, NC, USA). I was tasked with putting something together that was stylistically similar to the logo for the popular Premiere League team Arsenal, but with green and gold colors. Originally, I was asked to incorporate a train image into the design (symbolic of our town's history as a stop along an old railroad route), but that didn't work out too well. I was able to salvage from those efforts the shield backdrop, but decided to replace the train with the somewhat-popular player-in-action silhouette (modeled after some stock photo shots of real players doing cool stuff). The result was accepted by those who commissioned it:

You might wonder about the white star on the design. As it turns out, Cabarrus County (in which Harrisburg sits) is roughly triangular in shape. So I added the star to represent Harrisburg's general location in that triangle, using the "swoosh" of the ball and the shield edges to form the triangle itself in the logo. Oooh... mysterious...

The second logo was for the adult soccer team I play on, the Orange Crush. I really had no ideas on where to take this one, so the team captain whipped out some rough sketches of what he had in mind when he asked for the design:

I implemented the ideas, with some minor modifications, and we were good to go:

It simply wouldn't do to not thank Israel Curiel, Rachael Curiel, and David Karpey for their creative input into these designs. So, thanks, guys!

DiscipleNow 2011

2011-03-22T11:49:00.008-04:00

This past weekend, our church (Providence Baptist Church) hosted DiscipleNow, the Youth Ministry's annual "retreat you don't leave town for", and the biggest event in their calendar. Each year, a bunch of teenagers get divvied up by gender and age and spend the weekend sleeping in host homes (typically, the homes of other church members), sharing in small group studies with college leaders, and then worshiping all together back in the church's youth building. There's a guest speaker, a guest worship band, member-provided meals — everything you'd expect from a youth retreat, minus the long drive in a cramped van that smells like teenagers.

Like last year, I was asked to help design event T-shirts. I met with Minister to Students Paul Batson over hamburgers to brainstorm ideas. The theme for the event was to be "Pause", covering how life can get so busy with all the activities that consume our days and nights that often we fail to notice and acknowledge God. Sometimes, we just need to pause a bit and focus on the Eternal rather than merely on the immediate.

Now, I'm big on the idea of making shirts that are conversation points. In my experience, you don't get much conversation by wearing a giant "I'm a Christian" banner across your back. Oh, people will be talking, all right, but just about you, not so much to you. Still, we wanted to include something in the shirt that illustrated not just the noise of life and need to pause, but also the "punchline" of the event's theme. Paul brought to the table the idea of using the universal pause symbol — two side-by-side vertical bars — with perhaps some words scattered around them to represent those distracting activities. And we had a stylized text "Pause" logo to work with, provided by the publishers of the study. But we were still trying to find a way to make the God connection in the design.

Then, inspiration hit. I was thinking about slowing down, pausing, relaxing, growing silent, blocking out noise … these things led me to picture turning off the lights and just enjoying the stillness of a perfect night. And in that stillness, that's where we see God. And that was the a-ha moment! See, I use Contagious Graphics for my screen printing, and every October they start pushing their glow-in-the-dark ink. I'd never used that ink for a shirt project before, but here was the perfect chance to do so. What if we could design a shirt that showed God — literally — when the lights were off?

The result was a design printed on cardinal red shirts, with a constant stream of "distraction words" broken up only so that the negative space could reveal the pause symbol:

But what you don't see in the light is that certain of the letters of those "distraction words" are printed with glow-in-the-dark ink, so that when the lights go out, God is revealed:

The final product turned out great! And better yet, Paul didn't tell the teenagers that the shirt had this feature until Sunday morning when many of them were standing at the front of the church serving as an adhoc choir. It was fun to watch the wave of surprise wash over them when this little detail was revealed!

Here are some photos (taken by Chuck Shoupe) of folks wearing the shirts on DiscipleNow 2011 Sunday:

Adhoc Youth choir

Amy sings out, with Carson on the bass (Paul's the bald fellow on the right)

Mike and Nick play guitar

NOTE: The stylized "PAUSE" text in the shirt design was modeled after the logo of the Orange XP3 "Pause" curriculum used for the event, with permission (obtained by Paul) from the publishers. Thanks, Orange!

Out of a job. Kinda. (And thankful!)

2011-02-04T00:45:00.004-05:00

In 2006, CollabNet, Inc. helped the committership of the Subversion open source project organize and incorporate for the purposes of having a legal entity tasked with protecting that software, its intellectual property, the solidity of its brand, and its general well-being. I was elected as one of the first Directors of the newly formed Subversion Corporation, and served as its Treasurer for the entirety of the Corporation's existence. Today, I can speak in the past tense about that existence because…

Subversion Corporation is dead!

Now that Subversion — I mean, Apache™ Subversion® — is wrapped up in the loving and protective arms of the Apache Software Foundation, there was nothing for the Subversion Corporation to do anyway. So the membership voted to dissolve the corporation, and for the past ten months I've been working with my fellow Directors and the fine lawyerly folks at the Software Freedom Law Center to do exactly that.

So, I guess I'm out of a job now. Or, at least, that job. I'm grateful that the Subversion developer community trusted me with the position I uniquely held for the past four years. But honestly, if the opportunity to do it again came 'round, I think I'd have to decline. I'd much rather be coding.

Long live Subversion! Long live the Apache Software Foundation!

"Sita Sings the Blues" comes to Cabarrus County

2011-01-13T15:08:00.005-05:00

I was pleasantly surprised when I read the latest edition of In & Around Harrisburg (Issue No. 15, Jan. 13-27, 2011) and spotted a listing for an upcoming showing of Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues at the Davis Theatre in Concord, NC.

Why "pleasantly surprised"? It's not simply that this film is beautifully done, with all the bright colors of Indian culture vividly parading across the screen at a dazzling pace. It's not even just the hilarious, almost Monty-Python-esque narrators' dialogue. Nor is it the incredible soundtrack of Annette Hanshaw's 1920's-era tunes. Let's forget for a second that the story itself is a lovely one and is told here in a lovely way. I'm intrigued by the story behind the story.

Now, you can read for yourself the film's crazy history at the film's official website, http://sitasingstheblues.com. But the synopsis runs something like this: girl has cool, creative film vision; girl creates film to match her vision; girl runs smack dab into the ugly copyright culture's prohibitive approach to … everything; girl goes into more debt to get legally upright; girl then does something completely unorthodox — she gives her work away for free. Oh, and girl and film are arguably more popular now than they likely ever would have been under traditional distribution models.

As someone who makes his living writing (for the most part) free software — that is, software which itself costs nothing and for which the original source can be readily acquired and used and modified and redistributed by anyone who wants it — I constantly see the benefits of this permissive, sharing-oriented mindset. But it's been interesting to learn of Paley's own growing awareness, ultimate adoption, and now outright evangelism around the same permissive distribution model as applied to audiovisual works of art.

So if you find yourself looking for entertainment that's both fun and culturally educational (Sita… is a retelling of the epic Indian Ramayana tale), consider checking out this free showing of the film on January 20. For details, see the official showing information page at http://cabarrusartscouncil.org/news/?p=355. [Parents: It's been a few months since I saw the film, but I seem to recall that it had some elements that, in my family, at least, would earn it a PG-13 rating.]

Merry Christmas, CollabNet

2010-12-22T11:43:00.000-05:00

This holiday season, with so much reduced staffing, reduced scheduling, and outright unemployment in the workplace, I find myself especially thankful to have a job. And not just any job, but a job I genuinely enjoy. (Who wouldn't enjoy a job where you get to work — from home, even — on awesome free software such as Subversion?!) I've made some of my dearest friends and experienced some of my favorite moments through this job. That's just cool.

But as I reflect on the season — on the birth of Christ, on goodwill and peace on earth, and so on — I'm especially thankful for a job at a company that doesn't embarrass me. I don't find myself wrestling with my own conscience as I accept that paycheck. Sure, there have been times when I questioned certain methods or approaches, but (as I told my immediate supervisor this morning, actually) I've always been permitted to do so freely, always found my management chain very receptive to my input, and always found that — at least in the interactions I've been privy to — behaving honorably was the desired goal even when doing so might cost us a sales lead or a nice press release opportunity. As society ages and the almighty dollar continues to amass worshipers, I suspect that it is becoming increasingly more difficult for employees to say nice things about their employers (with a straight face, at least).

So thank you, CollabNet, for providing me the luxury of not just a great job, but one which doesn't force me to make ethical compromises. I don't know what the future holds for our relationship, but my family and I are grateful for the ride thus far.

Working For Good

2010-08-29T23:03:00.005-04:00

For as long as I can remember, I've heard Romans 8:28 heralded from church pulpits with no small amount of regularity. Here's the text, if you don't know it already:

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. — Romans 8:28 (KJV)

And again, in another translation (the one I most commonly read):

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him,^a who^b have been called according to his purpose. — Romans 8:28 (NIV)

What a powerful verse, right?! And so many applications, from motivation to comfort to conviction (at least according to the various pastors I've heard speak about the verse). Check it out:

Is life without meaning? Nope. God has a purpose for you.
What do I get out of loving God? Good stuff happens!
Why did God make SOME_BAD_THING happen? It wasn't really a bad thing, you just haven't seen the good in it yet.
Nono. It's really a bad thing. So why did God make SOME_BAD_THING happen? Um... are you not loving God enough? KA-BOOM!

Pretty cool stuff, huh? It's like a spiritual bat utility belt (Bible Belt? Ewww...).

But did you notice those footnote markers up there in the NIV version? I didn't. At least not until tonight. The footnote markers each denote different ways that the text could have been interpreted and translated from the original sources. Check out how the verse reads if you substitute the alternate translation marked "b":

And we know that in all things God works together with those who love him to bring about what is good—with those who have been called according to his purpose. — Romans 8:28 (NIV)

Whoa! It's like a whole different verse now. Suddenly the responsibility for bringing about good in the world falls back in our laps. We no longer just get to live a detached existence, loving God in a vacuum and ignoring those around us and then reaping all the resulting good stuff. Now we have to work — with God, who we of course still love — to bring about that good for ourselves and for others.

Quite honestly, I rather like that interpretation much better. It somehow seems more… logical; more consistent with the action-demonstrated kind of faith championed elsewhere throughout Scripture. What do you think?

Shooting Stars

2010-08-26T13:53:00.008-04:00

Youth soccer season is here again, and my youngest son couldn't be happier. His team (and seventeen others in his age bracket!) will take the field this Saturday as the first matches of the Harrisburg Parks and Recreation Fall 2010 Youth Soccer season take place. Okay, I confess — I'm pretty excited, too. This is my first season as a head coach in this age bracket, but I've assisted at this level for two years now. I easily have as much fun as the kids do!

This season, our team chose the name "Shooting Stars" (which was actually suggested by my wife), and as has become the routine, I managed to squirrel away 30 seconds to whip up a general logo design (once again composed on the table cover at Supper Restaurant) and then a couple of hours of digitization time.

Here's the final Shooting Stars Soccer Club logo:

… and the sketch that served as its humble roots:

UPDATE 9/7/2010: My patch order is in. Once again, the fine folks at Team Jedi Marketing have done a great job with the order:

Hot Lava

2010-04-16T10:40:00.005-04:00

I caved. I couldn't take the pressure. In a moment of Crayola insanity — an opportunity once again afforded by the wait for delicious food at Supper — I submitted to forces beyond my control and scratched out a logo design for my son's soccer team, the Hot Lava:

I snapped the above photo with my not-so-featureful-or-powerful camera phone and emailed it to myself on the spot. Later, I took the image and used it as a template to work up a vector graphic representation of the logo idea. This was a much less complicated bit of work than the Flaming Dragons logo I recently did, but that's okay — these are 5- and 6-year-old kids.

Here's the final work:

The team's head coach seems to like it, at least if I'm correctly interpreting "DUUUUUDE!!! THAT ROCKS!!!!! I LOVE IT!!!!!". So I guess it's a "go". I really enjoy doing these simple little projects. The smiles on the kids faces easily justifies the minimal cost I put into creating the logos.

Subversion Chat at CollabNet Virtual Conference

2010-04-14T14:41:00.007-04:00

Tomorrow, April 15, 2010, CollabNet is hosting its first ever virtual conference. Entitled "Agile ALM for Distributed Development", the fully virtual event is focused around the methodologies and products which make Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) possible and efficient, especially where geographically distributed teams need to collaborate seamlessly.

I'm hosting a "scheduled chat" on Subversion at 7:30am PDT. So, if you're available and online tomorrow around that time, and you'd to chat live with me about Subversion, then do the following:

Register for the conference. (Now! Go do it!)
Login at the appropriate time to the conference using the instructions you receive from the registration process.
Once logged in, visit the "Communication Center".
Click the "Scheduled Chats" item.
Click the "Subversion for the Enterprise" chat item. (It will only become a live link at the time of the session.)

This is a free-form chat with no agenda, so come with your questions. See you there!

Subversion Vision Conference in NYC

2010-03-23T18:02:00.003-04:00

I'm in New York City for the Subversion Vision Conference. Follow my daily progress reports via the Submerged blog.

Flaming Dragons

2010-03-17T10:53:00.006-04:00

Another season of youth soccer is upon us. Gavin's decided to take up piano this season, but Aidan is happy to have moved up to Harrisburg Parks and Recreation's 5/6 age bracket, the first in which the kids get to play actual soccer games.

The two guys I coached with last season on Gavin's team — Darryl Strack and Bobbie Middleton — have moved up with their kids to the 7/8 age bracket and are coaching together again. I ran into them last weekend, where I learned that their team had chosen the name "Flaming Dragons". I had a lot of fun with these guys last Fall with our Soccer Monsters team, including designing a team logo which we had made up into stickers and iron-on patches. So when Bobbie asked me last Saturday if I'd be willing to do the same for their new Flaming Dragons team, how could I pass that up? When eating lunch later day, I scratched out a rough idea in crayon (on the table top at Supper Restaurant) for the logo:

Then, I spent a few evening hours this week converting that simple drawing into a real vector artwork file:

Meanwhile, Aidan's team has chosen the name "Hot Lava". Not … really … sure what to do about that one just yet.

Subversion background (leather w/ punched holes ala Betts)

2009-11-30T13:03:00.006-05:00

When preparing my presentation for this year's SubConf conference, I was looking for a background that wasn't so … run-of-the-mill. I stumbled upon a post at "The Art of Adam Betts" (at http://www.artofadambetts.com) that advertised a really cool background graphic. After checking the site over to make sure that I could in good conscience make a derivative work from his piece of art, I snagged the sucker and did exactly that:

(Adam, I seriously hope you're cool with this. If not, a thousand pardons and I'll certainly pull this post and any related graphics.)

Revisionist History

2009-11-20T17:00:00.008-05:00

Remember the Subversion 1.0 celebration T-shirts? Alas, there are no `svnadmin dump' and `svnadmin load' for cottonware.

As you might have read elsewhere, the Subversion project has recently been accepted in the Apache Software Foundation's Incubator. As part of the process, we'll be migrating all kinds of goodies off of Tigris.org — which has been the project's home (and a good one at that) for the past near-decade — and onto Apache-hosted servers. Last weekend we took the first of those steps by migrating our version control history. I managed the Subversion side of this migration, prepping the data for delivery into the ASF Infrastructure team's able hands.

But I wanted to do more than simply move our Subversion history from one place to another. See, when Subversion began, it was a bunch of source code living in a CVS repository. When the source code compiled into something trustworthy, we let Subversion hold it own source code. (For the record, we were never given cause to regret that decision.) But at the time we made that change, there was no reliable and simple way to convert CVS history into Subversion history like there is with cvs2svn today. So we just exported the latest snapshot of our main development line, imported that into Subversion, and dealt with the severed history. However, this repository migration — which was going to be disruptive anyway — presented an opportunity to stitch together our old CVS history and our Subversion history. So I did. Here's how:

Using cvs2svn, I converted all CVS history to Subversion and deposited it into a temporary repository, svn-from-cvs.
Now, the CVS repository data contained some trailing changes that were created after the switch to Subversion back in 2001. Most of those were commits to www/ (which we manually mirrored for a while based on our Subversion commits to trunk/www/). A couple of them were things like system-wide automated tweaks to www/robots.txt made by CollabNet folk. Also, we had real tags and branches in our CVS repos that we didn't bring with us into Subversion. So I dumped the first 3654 revisions from svn-from-cvs — the pre-switchover changes only — and loaded that into the stitch repository, svn-complete.
To historically preserve the fact that apparently we didn't care too much about those old CVS tags and branches, I committed their deletion from svn-complete (but left the branches/ and tags/ top-level directories themselves).
Since the first revision of our project's Subversion history (in the main svn repository) was a massive import into trunk, that would have clashed mightily being loaded atop already-existing files and directories in svn-complete. So instead checked I out svn-complete/trunk@HEAD, then exported svn/trunk@1 atop it. The local mods were the small delta between what we got outta CVS on August 31, 2001, and what we put into Subversion. They were mostly the result of $Date$ keyword formatting differences. I committed those local mods, which now brought svn-complete into sync with svn@1' except that svn-complete still had empty tags/ and branches/ directories (which were added in r532 and r1237, respectively).
I dumped -r2:531 of svn, loading the result into svn-complete.
I skipped r532 (the revision in which we created our tags/ directory) from svn, instead adding a no-op placeholder revision to svn-complete.
I then dumped -r533:1236 of svn, loading the result into svn-complete.
Once again, I skipped r1237 (the revision in which we created our branches/ directory) from svn, instead adding another no-op placeholder revision to svn-complete.
Finally, I dumped the rest of the svn history (r1238:r40515), loading those revisions into svn-complete.

The result was a single repository (svn-complete) of 44170 revisions (3654 from CVS, 40515 from Subversion, and 1 cleanup revision) that contained all of the Subversion project's version control history, starting with the inception of the project. It's this data that I handed off to the ASF Infrastructure team.

The ASF Infrastructure team took this repository's data and loaded it into the ASF repository (with external commits disabled to prevent interleaved commit history). At the time that this history was loaded into the ASF repository, that repository already had 836419 revisions in it. The next 3655 revisions represent the Subversion CVS history (plus a fixup revision). This means that any historical references found in Subversion's source code, issue trackers, mailing lists, etc. that refer to pre-migration revisions (which are easy to spot, as they are all quite a bit smaller than 800000!) may be found in the ASF repository by adding 836419 + 3655 = 840074 to the revision number.

We as a project are still really finding all the places that this change of address (and revision numbers) will affect us. I can assure you that the last place I expected it to hit was my clothes closet, though!

Name-dropping Jesus

2009-11-13T11:19:00.000-05:00

Don't you just love it when you personally benefit just by knowing someone else? Maybe (just maybe) you're considering an order of some trophies for your eldest son's soccer team, and one of the other dads on your youngest son's soccer teams says, "Oh, you should check out Awards Express — I always get my stuff from them. They turn around high-quality orders quickly and professionally. Tell 'em Tray sent you!" And instantly, you feel like some kind of V.I.P., empowered to trade on someone else's good name and reap the benefits of their relationships with a mutual contact.

That's kinda the way prayer works for Christians. I was thinking tonight about how I was taught that prayers are supposed to end. You know, some variation of "In Jesus name, Amen." This isn't merely the result of some ancient meaningless ritual passed down through the generations. It's the way Jesus told us to pray. In John 14:12-14, He tells us that after He returns to His Father (which, if you haven't noticed, He already did), He will do whatever we ask in His name. We find similar statements in John 15:16 and later again in John 16:23-26. Basically, Jesus is hearing our complaints and concerns and needs and desires, and He tells us, "Hey, I know exactly who you should talk to about this stuff. My Father is the best in the business. He can hook you up. Tell him I sent you."

Now, if ever there was a name worth dropping, the Son of God's is the one. But sometimes I wonder if the following happens when I pray:

[Tinkling sounds of bells rapping against the closing door.]

God: Yes, can I help you?

Me: Uh, yeah. I'm looking for solutions to some of Life's problems.

God: Oh, well then you've come to exactly the right spot. I designed Life — nobody knows how it works better than I do. Now, I could take a small bit of offense that you would claim the product is flawed. I can assure you that it isn't. But as it turns out, I'm also really good at forgiving, so let's just move past that. What did you have in mind.

Me: Well, I was kinda thinking that maybe you could cause X to happen. That would really work out well for me.

God [clearly uncomfortable]: Hrm. Well, that's not really how I had things planned for you, but...

Me: Yeah, I know. See, something tells me that there's a purpose for my life that's bigger than just me, but I really, really want to just get X. I just think that makes the most sense for me.

God: You seem pretty confident about this request. Are you sure you've come to the right spot? I'm usually pretty picky about making sure that the work I do is for everyone's benefit.

Me: Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Your Son sent me; told me you were the best in the business.

God: Oh! You know my Son?! Well that changes everything. You two are close? Good friends? Maybe you guys work together?

Me: [clearly uncomfortable] Well ... I wouldn't exactly say we're close, really. I met Him some years ago, and we see each other from time to time. He's good friends with my wife's grandparents, so, you know, practically part of the family, sorta, I mean, not that we ask Him over for Thanksgiving or anything, but...

[Extended silence. Awkwaaaaard.]

Maybe I should strengthen my friendship with Christ before using His name for my gain, huh?

Go back and read John 15:16. Better yet, check out some more of the context by looking at John 15:14-17:

¹⁴ You are my friends if you do what I command. ¹⁵ I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. ¹⁶ You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit — fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. ¹⁷ This is my command: Love each other. — John 15:14-17 NIV (emphasis added)

Think my fictitious scenario above exaggerates too much? I'm not so sure. See what Jesus says in Matthew about folks trading on his good name without the fruit to justify it:

¹⁸ A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. ¹⁹ Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰ Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them. ²¹ "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. ²² Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' ²³ Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!' — Matthew 7:18-23 NIV

Are you just name-dropping Jesus? Man, sometimes I do. I've witnessed the power of prayers made in His name and in a spirit of obedience, but I confess that many times my name-dropping is just bogus. I need to work on that — need to work on my friendship with Christ, need to work on my obedience to His commands, need to work on bearing fruit, and need to work on loving my neighbor — because I definitely don't want to experience any awkward encounters with God. How about you?

Harrisburg Area Land Use Planning kick-off meeting

2009-11-12T23:56:00.000-05:00

Tonight I attended my very first civic community meeting, a kickoff meeting focused on the Harrisburg Area Land Use Planning effort. The meeting was a couple of hours in length, and drew what I would guess to have been about 150-200 people (though I'm really bad at estimating such things). I thoroughly enjoyed myself there — enjoyed seeing other folks in attendance that I know, enjoyed meeting some new folks (including our town's mayor), and enjoyed feeling like I was participating in something of value to my community. I learned several things about my town that I didn't know beforehand. And overall, it was a good opportunity to just listen to what others in my community think about the direction our town is heading.

Harrisburg, NC has in recent years been at odds with itself about land use. Our residents are fortunate to have some of the highest personal income levels in the area, and the town offers some of the lowest tax rates in the area. But we're growing like mad, and that necessarily has town planners busy, you know, planning to accommodate that growth. But how that growth happens has become a bit of a sticking point. It's easy to find folks with extreme opinions about the matter. Many oppose "big-box" commercial development, citing concerns about increased traffic, crime, and low-paying jobs probably filled by folks that can't afford to live in the town itself. Many others are begging for the entrance of large-scale commercial development, hoping that tax revenues from such places will fund the town's growth so that increased personal property taxes don't have to. Some read the phrase "bedroom community for Charlotte" with disdain; some with delight. Reconciling these viewpoints will certainly prove challenging for those tasked with doing so.

I look forward to the next meeting in this series, though I'm more than a little concerned that as the presentations and discussions progress from the general to the specific, these will devolve into battles of opposing viewpoints. Tonight's meeting intentionally cast absolutely no direction, at all, for the town. And yet there were already plenty of folks willing to voice strong opinions about how things ought to be, some of which were definitely assuming a defensive position. That's really not helpful. If you are a Harrisburg resident and happen by some misfortune to have wound up on this blog post, please, please do your fellow citizens the courtesy of not assuming that they want to ruin your quality of living — while a perfect solution that pleases everyone might not be possible to achieve, you can be pretty sure that forsaking honest communication for bickering will hinder the creation of even a tolerable solution.

(Oh. And no, Mom and Mom-in-law, my attendance at this meeting does not mean that I'm gearing up for a bid on a Harrisburg Town Council seat. It was just another way to connect with our community. Sorry to disappoint.)

ApacheCon: Where Subversion, Apache, and 100% Cotton intersect

2009-11-04T18:48:00.008-05:00

Today during the opening ceremonies of the U.S. ApacheCon 2009 conference, Hyrum Wright (President of the Subversion Corporation) and Brian Behlendorf (a representative of both Apache and CollabNet's Board of Directors) made a joint announcement that the Subversion project was immediately seeking acceptance in the incubation process at the Apache Software Foundation.

Thanks to CollabNet's generosity (and my wife Amy's general coolness about my occasional business-related travel), I was able to be present for this historical event. Also, I was fortunate to have been given the opportunity to design the official commemorative T-shirt of the event:

It's not the cleanest thing I've ever done graphically. I really, really like the striped front. But I was tasked with conveying an awful lot of information (the 10-year anniversary of the ASF, Subversion's fit into the mix of other Apache projects, CollabNet's history as founder and primary corporate sponsor of the project, and so on), and the resulting busy-ness of the back's design unfortunately conveys that fact. Still, not too shabby for short-deadline (like, three days) work.

SubConf/Munich 2009

2009-11-03T18:42:00.004-05:00

As I compose this, I'm 38,000 feet above sea level and somewhere between Charlotte and Denver, en route (ultimately) to this year's U.S. Apachecon event. Seems it was just yesterday that I was flying home from my last conference event. Perhaps that's because it was just a few days ago that I passed through Customs in Charlotte after the lengthy flight home from Munich, Germany. I'd been in Munich for the third SubConf Subversion user conference. I've had the pleasure of attending the prior two years as well, and this year's event was again a enjoyable one.

After helping to coach Gavin's soccer team to an 8-1 victory last Saturday, I hurried home, grabbed my bags, and was off to the airport. My direct flight from Charlotte to Munich landed Sunday morning around 8:30am local time. A couple of train rides and a short walk later, I was checking into the B & B Hotel, where (I was told) "all the cool kids" — that is, some fellow Subversion developers — were staying. I spent Sunday afternoon getting settled into the hotel and resting, then met up with Hyrum Wright for the express purposes of reprising last year's trip to Berni's Nudelbrett and to plan how we'd invest our time on Monday.

Hyrum and I decided on a trip to Salzburg, Austria for our Monday outing. It was two hours away by train, so we caught the earliest one we could manage. While in Salzburg, we visited the Hohensalzburg Fortress (an 11th-century fortress that overlooks the city), the Residenz State Rooms, Mozart's birthplace, and some other spots in the city. Afterwards, we took a bus out to the town of Grönig, where we rode the Untersberg Cable Car up into the mountains. Wow! Suspended above the earth by a wire the thickness of my forearm, watching as rocky crags passed underneath, I was overwhelmed by the novelty of it all. This was not a normal day in the life of Mike Pilato, to say the least. Our train back to Munich got us in town in time for dinner, which we took at one of the city's many beerhouses. (Thankfully, the locals don't take it too personally when we tourists opts for Coke and Fanta.)

I returned to the hotel around 10:00pm, where two things were waiting for me: a group of Subversion developer colleagues, and a nasty surprise from the SubConf event organizers. It seems that an employee of Polarion who was slated to present an all-day Subversion workshop the following day (Tuesday) fell ill, and then made the poor decision to use email — nice, asynchronous, non-interrupting, unacknowledged email — as his medium for telling the event organizers that he had to bail on the workshop. By the time they realized that they had no one to present the workshop, the organizers had to scramble for assistance. They found me online and asked if I could present the workshop instead. I was completely unprepared to do so, but offered to help as best as I could.

Fortunately, things took a turn for the better when I then went down to the lobby to meet up with my colleagues. While I was bemoaning this situation and my lack of preparedness, the angel Michael — no, not that one; Michael Diers (from Elego) — offered to assist me for the first half of the day-long workshop and to take over entirely in the latter half. And as if that wasn't great enough, I was then presented with the finished results of the T-shirt I designed for the conference:

Tuesday's workshop went pretty well, actually, thanks largely to Michael's familiarity with the topic and ready-on-hand materials. After lunch I was finally able to meet up with several other Subversion developers in a room the conference organizers had arranged for us to occupy for hackathon purposes. We worked for a few hours before heading over to participate as a panel in a Developer Roundtable event — an hour and a half of face-to-face interaction with Subversion users and administrators interested in learning more about Subversion's upcoming features or in solving particular Subversion problems they were having. I love these events for the fact that they serve to remind me that at the other side of every bug report or feature request is another human being who isn't just trying to make work for us as developers but is merely trying to get stuff done.

Wednesday morning, I delivered my keynote presentation, The Subversion Legacy (So Far...). I took the attendees on a brief walk through Subversion's history, beginning with its instantiation as an open-source project by CollabNet and continuing through to the current day, and focusing on aspects of the community and of key events and decisions which have contributed to Subversion's success. Despite the language challenge (most of the attendees were more comfortable communicating in German), I got positive feedback. And with that completed, I was in the clear in terms of obligations to the conference, and joked that I was now able to return to my typical 40% stress level.

I spent the rest of Wednesday and most of Thursday working on Subversion itself in the hackathon room with the other developers. We had occasional breaks to take in presentations by our peers, but mostly spent the time trying to improve the very software that the conference existed to celebrate. Thursday night those of us that remained went to dinner in Munich, sharing a final last few minutes together. A casual onlooker would never guess that we live scattered across the globe, only occasionally seeing each other in person. (In fact, I met one of my CollabNet colleagues for the first time on this trip!)

I traveled to the airport Friday morning with Greg Stein, hopped onto my plane bound for Charlotte, and was fortunate to sleep two-thirds of the flight away. I was greeted in Charlotte on Friday afternoon by my incredible, amazing wife and children. The opening theme of my keynote was about gratitude, and gratitude for good friends and a loving family served as the bookend to that week-long trip to Germany.

Soccer Monsters

2009-10-05T18:43:00.001-04:00

I don't know why, but my oldest son's soccer team chose the name "Soccer Monsters". I have trouble prioritizing how I spend time, so for kicks, I whipped up (with the assistance of Amy's valuable feedback and suggestions) a team logo:

The coaches liked the result. Now our little 5- and 6-year-old soccer stars are sporting embroidered patches of the logo on their jerseys (thanks, Patches4Less), and slappin' stickers of the logo all over the place (thanks, Contagious Graphics).

Review: Main Street Steak & Seafood, Harrisburg, NC

2009-10-04T22:06:00.006-04:00

At the core of every pessimist's belief system is a simple truth: if you expect the worst, you'll only get pleasant surprises. At the core of every realist's belief system is another: if you expect the worst, and consistently receive it, pessimism might just be warranted.

Long ago, 4351 Main Street, Suite 111 — located in Harrisburg's Town Center — held Ciro's Italian Restaurant. Amy and I lived in Chicagoland at the time, and were only able to visit that establishment once. I recall enjoying it and remarking that it was much like having an Olive Garden in Harrisburg, but without the cookie-cutter chain restaurant feel. But eventually Ciro's moved out of that space, making way for a new tenant: Parma Ristorante. Now, my understanding is that Parma was actually a reincarnation of a separate restaurant (Roma's) which had previously occupied a location on the outskirts of the town. We had friends who swore by Roma's pizza, but our own experiences there were mediocre at best. Sadly, mediocre took a turn for awful when Parma opened up. This isn't a review of Parma, and perhaps it isn't kind to speak of the dead, but suffice it to say that despite multiple opportunities to impress us during visits to that shop — even across its various management and ownership changes — it not only failed to impress, but it failed to even remotely please. Parma was, quite simply, a monumental culinary disaster.

When Main Street Steak & Seafood opened its doors a few weeks ago in the old Ciro's/Parma location, we looked forward with cautious optimism to trying it out. That optimism was quickly crushed by the terrifying review of the establishment that we received from some good friends. Their nightmare-ish experience at the place — which ultimately resulted in them having to cancel subsequent plans for their evening — was one for the storybooks. If I recall correctly, the only positive thing that could be said was that the dessert tasted good. And even that was bittersweet, as said dessert was delivered in unrequested take-home boxes! So, as you can probably imagine, it was with justifiable pessimism that my wife, Amy, and I wandered into Main Street Steak & Seafood last night.

Our first impression of the restaurant was not exactly ideal, though in fairness, only some of that could be helped. The orientation of Suite 111 in that building is such that the restaurant doors are on what could arguably be considered the back side of the restaurant. I've got a whole set of opinions about the design of Harrisburg's Town Center that aren't particularly relevant here, but again, this is just what Main Street S & S has to work with. What can be improved is not allowing a number of staffers to sit in a bench near the hostess stand with their backs to the window awaiting incoming customers. Even if there isn't always something to be done in a restaurant, the customers need to think there is.

The restaurant was busy, but not crowded. Several staff members were bustling about, doing their thing. One got the sense that the place was alive — not quite abuzz, but definitely alive — with activity. Gone were the old Tuscan tones of Ciro's and Parma. New cuisine demands new decor, and MSS&S has opted for a more contemporary blue and silver look, sparsely accented with iron works and some somewhat out-of-place looking fish caricatures. Modern jazz music added to the ambience, playing at appropriate levels — even though we were seated directly beside the kitchen, we heard more of each other than of the music, and more of the music than of shuffling pots and pans. As this was a rare chance for Amy and I to have a dinner without our kids, "more of each other" was a big plus for us.

Soon after we were seated, our server, Chad, greeted us and took our drink orders. While the wine list appeared to be about a page long, we opted for soft drinks on this evening instead. Chad returned with the drinks (served in unassuming glassware) a short while later, bringing a basket of breadsticks as well. We needed some extra time to decide on our orders, and Chad granted us that without disappearing into that abyss that often consumes other waitstaff in similar situations. Amy and I eventually decided to opt out of an appetizer, hoping to save some room for dessert. Chad took our dinner orders, and then set off to register them with the kitchen while we set off to munch on the rather tasty breadsticks.

Our salads were delivered quickly, and were much larger than we expected for the $2 paid for them. Amy went the garden-salad-with-balsamic-vinaigrette route, and she was pleased by the thick dressing and (again) the large portion. My Caesar salad was good, too, but even though I could see that the dressing was thoroughly mixed throughout the greens, I wasn't able to taste it in my first several bites. I suspect it was mixed when the lettuce leaves were still wet from washing, which watered the taste down below the threshold of detectability. But as I settled into the salad, that Caesar dressing taste began to appear. In the end, it was largely forgettable as salads go. But forgettable is actually quite fine when you've every reason to expect much, much worse.

Our entrees arrived just as Amy (who is a slower eater than I am) was finishing her salad. We had chosen entrees that we were familiar with so that we could have some point of reference for comparison. Amy's filet mignon was cooked properly and accompanied by smashed potatoes and mixed vegetables. We were surprised to see yellow carrots amongst the mixed vegetables — those aren't common in area restaurants. Amy had positive things to say about her entree's taste, the portion sizes of the sides, and the cool plate all of this was served on. Her only negative comment was that she felt the veggies might have been improved with some seasoning. My oscar-style grilled salmon was also properly cooked, flaking apart as I expected without any detectable dryness save for a small, thinner corner section. It was topped by asparagus that, too, was well prepared — al dente enough to remain crisp and encourage knifework, but soft enough to drape across the salmon fillet. I, too, had the smashed potatoes, which weren't the garlic mashed I'd hoped were available, but which served their starchy purpose.

The main course came to a close much as it often does: my plate empty, and Amy's only halfway so. Here we learned the downside of those "cool" plates: those suckers are heavy. We asked Chad for a take-home box for Amy's leftovers, but the restaurant should strongly consider having the servers perform the transfer of food to boxes instead of leaving the customers to deal with those heavy plates themselves. Once the leftovers were boxed, Chad gave us the dessert selection. The options were fairly straightforward — no fancy dessert names evoking imagery of volcanoes, tropical destinations, or one's own demise. "Chocolate cake" was the first mentioned, and I'm not sure were even paid much attention to the rest of the list because clearly (to my wife, anyway) it was a night for chocolate. They were out of ice cream, so we ordered a coffee accompaniment. Chad returned shortly thereafter with a whopping chunk of 3-layer cake, drizzled with chocolate and raspberry sauce (and, of course, our coffee). Here Amy's and my opinions diverged. That the cake was served chilled was to her a great thing, somehow balancing out with the hot coffee in her universe. Me? I want soft, moist, and warm cake. I want the chocolate to ooze, the icing to drip, and to feel like I need to keep a spoon on standby when the fork can't keep up with the whole lot of the liquefying mess that ensues. This fact, however, did not prevent me from performing my husbandly duties and eating 49% of the cake. Warm, cold, or otherwise, it was a tasty cake. Then upon our request, Chad provided us with the bill, and that was that.

Overall, our visit to Main Street Steak & Seafood was nothing like what we expected. In stark contrast to the experiences of our friends, the service we received was outstanding. Food-wise, I can't say that anything we had was unique or inspirational, but perhaps that's okay right now. Maybe playing it safe and establishing a client base is wise given the disappointing track record of the previous establishment. I would certainly encourage the management to consider some more creative options, though, perhaps offering the entrees with choices of cooking styles and/or sauces. As for Amy and I, we welcome this new addition to Harrisburg's foodscape, and look forward to returning for another visit some time.

UPDATE 01/18/2010: Amy and I visited Main Street Steak & Seafood multiple times after this first visit. Perhaps as expected, our opinion of the place plateaued quickly. I guess that after being flatly shocked not to hate the place on our first visit, we eventually realized that there wasn't really much to love, either. The food was fine — and just fine. We never had a single dish that tasted like the chef had tried to personalize it. We never left upset, mind you — just a bit underwhelmed. And now Main Street Steak & Seafood has joined the ranks of the many restaurants to have bit the dust at 4351 Main Street in Harrisburg.

A new generation of Jedi

2009-08-27T13:47:00.004-04:00

George Lucas haunts my dreams as of late.

Many months ago, my oldest son, Gavin, got into robots. Wall-E was his world. In a moment of parental weakness and nostalgia, I guess, I showed him a YouTube clip of the Hoth battle sequence from The Empire Strikes Back, with the goal of introducing him to AT-AT walkers. Oh, dear. What a can of worms I opened that day. What were these laser cannon things? Those sweet snowspeeders? And what, pray tell, is that gloriously glowing sword of light, Dad?! PLEASE TELL ME NOW!!

Gavin (6) and his brother Aidan (4) fashioned out of paper and string masks for themselves — Darth Vader, and a Storm Trooper — to wear while playing. Their dollar-store foam swords were swords no more, but light sabers. Gavin's thirst for Star Wars grew insatiable. Without my knowledge, he got his grandpa to spend an evening on YouTube cruising movie clips. There he learned of such unsavory characters as General Grievous and Darth Maul. Indeed, he appears to have already begun embracing the way of the Dark Side of the Force (at least, that's what his mother says when her patience is tried).

In fairness to him, I have admittedly fed his interest somewhat. Star Wars was fascinating to me as a kid, too. I was his age when The Empire Strikes Back was released, and I have a vague memory of seeing the film in the theater — quite possibly my first theater experience ever. (This fact is not lost on Gavin when I tell him he's too young to watch the movie himself.) When I asked some friends for suggestions on new games for our Wii console, I was advised to look into the Lego game series. Naturally, I settled on Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. My whole family has loved playing this game, which is challenging enough to be enjoyable to the adults while still being great fun for the kids, too.

It didn't stop there, though. It couldn't. The music in that game — most notably "The Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme)" — stirred my own Star Wars desires. I purchased a CD of orchestral recordings of various songs from the original Star Wars trilogy, as well as the DVDs of all six of the films. Those arrived a week or so ago. The CD is now near-daily fuel for my sons' imaginations; the DVDs have provided my wife and I with some late-night entertainment, too.

But now the Star Wars connection is appearing outside the family, too. Yesterday on Facebook, a good friend posted a status message about watching Episode 2, and the following thread (edited for brevity) ensued:

Ben Collins-Sussman: Star Wars episode 2 is truly one of the worst movies ever made. Why can't I stop watching? It's like rubbernecking a car wreck.

C. Michael Pilato: I just watched that last night! … But look on the bright side -- it's still better than Episode III.

John Bourdeaux: There are few things more disappointing than episodes 1-3.

C. Michael Pilato: @John: Agreed. Though Episode 6 is a close call. It's like some kind of interplanetary smash-up of Fraggle Rock and Willow.

Greg Kirkpatrick: I can't wait for lucas to finally make episodes 1-3 …

Brian W. Fitzpatrick: What are you guys talking about? I always thought it was a shame that they never made any Star Wars movies after Return of the Jedi back in the 80s.

C. Michael Pilato: "Comes first, denial does. When clears the haze, reality you see. Six films there are: three of worth, three of the Dark Side. Now sets in, pain. Afraid not are you of poor storytelling? You will be. You wiiiiiiiill be." -- Master Yoda

Greg Kirkpatrick: noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo…!

And the references show up lately even when not talking directly about Star Wars. Yesterday, I also learned that one of my and my wife's favorite musicians, Jennifer Knapp, appears to have returned from obscurity. But when glancing at comments made on an article announcing this fact, I see:

I hope she doesn’t George Lucas her career up.
— buffalo Buffalo buffalo · Aug 27, 12:13 PM ·

Can Pandora's box be shut? And, all joking aside, do I really want it shut? I mean, isn't it better to have two young boys whose imaginations are bursting with activity and whose play involves clearly defined ideas of right and wrong than to have kids whose eyes are glazed over from watching too much Dora the Explorer and Spongebob? (That's a rhetorical question — I'm confident in my own answer.)

Harrisburg-area "Kids Eat Free/Cheap" schedule

2009-08-25T10:40:00.012-04:00

[Since my first post of this blog item, I've been contacted by folks associated with a really cool site, Kids Eat For (http://kidseatfor.com/), which tracks similar information, uses a voting system to keep data fresh, and even offers related iPhone and Android apps! When last I checked, the site was lacking many of the deals listed here, but thanks to the way it is set up, that's a problem you or I can solve. Click here to search that site for Harrisburg-area stuff.]

[Last Updated 08/31/2009]

I like to save money. The businesses near my home like to make money. Some of those businesses are smart enough to realize that if they give a little, I give a little, and we all wind up happy. I'm hear to talk about businesses near Harrisburg, NC that offer "Kids Eat Free" or discounted kids meals on certain nights. If you own a restaurant and offer these types of programs, my family (and others, too) will patronize your business, and will do so in preference to others that don't woo us through our children's bellies.

But since I've failed to find a reliable source of organized information about such offering in my area, I've decided to try to collect as much right here on this blog post. So, what follows is what I've found. You should assume that the definition of "kids" used here is "humans 12 years of age or younger".

Sunday: Dickey's Barbecue Pit (6189 Bayfield Pkwy, Concord, 704-262-3337) — kids eat free; Firehouse Subs (8111 Concord Mills Blvd. Ste 670, Concord, 704-979-9900) — kids eat free after 4pm with adult combo; Firehouse Subs (7712 Sossaman Lane Suite 100, Concord, 704-979-3737) — kids eat free after 4pm with adult combo; IHOP (230 E Wt Harris Blvd, Charlotte, 704-717-9600) — kids eat free 4-10pm; Zapata's Mexican Cantina (8927 J M Keynes Dr., Charlotte, 704-503-1979) — kids eat free with paying adult
Monday: IHOP (230 E Wt Harris Blvd, Charlotte, 704-717-9600) — kids eat free 4-10pm; Supper (4435 Hwy 49 Suite 100, Harrisburg, 704-454-7120) — kids eat free after 4:30pm
Tuesday: Denny's (8031 Concord Mills Blvd, Concord, 704-979-7474) — kids eat free 4-11pm; IHOP (230 E Wt Harris Blvd, Charlotte, 704-717-9600) — kids eat free 4-10pm; McAlister's Deli (8599 Concord Mills Blvd, Concord, 704-979-0600) — kids eat free; Texas Roadhouse (7801 Gateway Lane, Concord, 704-979-3090) — kids eat free 4-8pm
Wednesday: Firehouse Subs (8111 Concord Mills Blvd. Ste 670, Concord, 704-979-9900) — kids eat free after 4pm with adult combo; Firehouse Subs (7712 Sossaman Lane Suite 100, Concord, 704-979-3737) — kids eat free after 4pm with adult combo; Foster's Grille (8520 Pit Stop Rd. Suite 10, Concord, 704-979-3663) — kids eat free; IHOP (230 E Wt Harris Blvd, Charlotte, 704-717-9600) — kids eat free 4-10pm; Shane's Rib Shack (199 Ken Hoffman Dr., Charlotte, 704-503-3113) — kids eat free
Thursday: IHOP (230 E Wt Harris Blvd, Charlotte, 704-717-9600) — kids eat free 4-10pm
Friday: IHOP (230 E Wt Harris Blvd, Charlotte, 704-717-9600) — kids eat free 4-10pm
Saturday: Denny's (8031 Concord Mills Blvd, Concord, 704-979-7474) — kids eat free 4-11pm; IHOP (230 E Wt Harris Blvd, Charlotte, 704-717-9600) — kids eat free 4-10pm; Texas Land & Cattle (7779 Lyles Lane, Concord, 704-510-0021) — kids eat free 11am-4pm

Do you have something to add to this list? A correction to offer? Leave a comment, and let me know about it. Cost-conscious Harrisburgian parents, unite!

Are you a business owner in the Harrisburg, NC area who is not on this list? Perhaps it's time to get with the program.

Here are some other sites with similar collections of information, though perhaps not focused specifically on the Harrisburg area:

DISCLAIMER: I assume no responsibility for this information being incomplete, misleading, or downright wrong. While I'll try to keep it fresh and accurate, the onus is on you, the Reader, to verify this information before packing up your Suburban-full of hungry little monsters and heading off to terrorize one of these fine local establishments with an eye on saving a few bucks. Ya dig?

NOTE: Some of the information in updated versions of this post has come via the comments associated with the post. So if you read a comment that appears to suggest something already present in my post, chances are pretty good that the comment was there before I made the change/addition. Not that you should care anyway — we're here to discuss free food, not reading comprehension.

The Internet is weird

2009-08-06T12:35:00.003-04:00

WARNING: Some of the content linked from this post contains, shall we say, unnecessarily strong language.

Through a series of links traversed today, I was reminded of a cheesy rendition of a song I did some time ago (and posted on this blog). But it wasn't my song rendition that prompted me to write a blog post today. It was watching somebody I've never met lip-syncing to it that did the trick.

Man, the Internet is weird.

SubConf 2009 is in my future

2009-08-03T15:50:00.000-04:00

I'm in the process of booking travel and lodging for my October trip to Munich. Yep, it's almost time for the annual SubConf Subversion conference, again. This year, I get to do something new: the keynote! In addition to that, I and some other Subversion developers will be hosting another Subversion roundtable discussion. We did this at last year's conference, and — at least according to the conference organizers — it was a wildly successful opportunity for Subversion's users to talk directly with the folks that write the software they use. If you are a Subversion user or developer who'll be in or around Munich on October 26th, I hope you'll consider joining us for this roundtable discussion. And of course, if you can attend the full conference (October 27-29), I'm sure you'll find it immensely beneficial to you and your organization's understanding, appreciation, and use of Subversion.

Speaking of that keynote presentation, I'd like to offer you the opportunity to help me out with it. (Did you like how I made that sound like it was actually you that would benefit from this?) Check out my post on the Submerged blog about this topic: http://blogs.open.collab.net/svn/2009/08/how-has-subversion-changed-your-world.html

Encouraging openness at Intuit

2009-07-29T09:05:00.008-04:00

Yesterday, Intuit (the company that brings you such well-known software products as Quicken, TurboTax, and QuickBooks) announced the launch of code.intuit.com, their new open source community for "developers interested in creating connected online applications for small businesses". While the company isn't opening up any of its own software right now, the goal of the new community is to rally folks around its Intuit Partner Platform. I can't boast any experience with this platform, but from what I've read and seen about its various key components, it looks pretty slick!

You might be wondering why — given my lack of personal experience with these products and platforms — I'm writing about this at all. What's the connection between code.intuit.com and me? Two words: "open source". The Intuit folks were discerning enough to recognize that while they wanted to create and nurture a true, viable open source community, this was a new venture for them. So they've assembled an advisory board consisting of open source veterans to help guide them as they develop their new community. I am a grateful recipient of the invitation to participate (along with Jay Sullivan of Mozilla, Michael Coté of Redmonk, and Jason van Zyl of Apache Maven) on that initial advisory board.

I'm really looking forward to being a part of this, not so much for what I can bring to the table but for what I can learn from the others in the process. It will be interesting for me to see how the experiences I've had with the Subversion and other open source software projects — and even with my employer's own community site — will apply here. One thing's for sure: I definitely need to re-read Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software book!

For more information, read the full Intuit public announcement at http://ippblog.intuit.com/blog/2009/07/announcing-codeintuitcom-ipp-open-source-community.html.

If your first flush won't succeed...

2009-07-23T10:22:00.003-04:00

Upon dealing (again) with the temperamental handle on the men's restroom toilet at the Rocky River Coffee Co., I was reminded of another such beast that I was privileged to visit daily when I was working with CollabNet's Subversion development team in a small office in Chicago's centenarian Old Colony Building. The building doesn't offer bathrooms on every floor — we had to travel a couple of floors (from our 10th floor office space) to use it. It's diva-esque disposition was such that only precise manipulation would convince it to function properly. My co-workers and I, having reverse-engineered the requisite love this bowl thrived on, one day decided to share our results with other building tenants by way of a posted, poetic sign above the tank:

If your first flush won't succeed, A second flush this bowl may need. (The most effective second flush Comes while the first is in mid-gush.)

We were thankful, of course, that the thing could be forced to work at all. There was a more convenient urinal which lived in a tiny closet halfway up the stairs between the 9th and 10th floors — a men's toilet with no women-targeted counterpart (reflecting the realities of the workforce balance 100 years ago) — which at some point simply stopped flushing altogether.

I'm not sure which particular quirk of my psyche compelled me to share this story. But there ya go. (Karl, Ben, Fitz: I miss you guys.)

Review: Forty Six, Kannapolis, NC

2009-05-23T22:10:00.004-04:00

Next door to the historic Gem Theatre in Kannapolis, NC is a restaurant that I've been dying to try out. There, on West 1st Street, nestled between the old-school Cannon Village retail strip and the quite new North Carolina Research Campus, lies Forty Six (www.restaurantfortysix.com), an upscale establishment focused on promoting a "culture of healthy food". Thanks to Amy's parents offering their childsitting services tonight, we were finally able to try this place out. For you impatient readers who interpret "healthy food" to mean "nasty food" — as might our four-year-old son — let me simply summarize our experience by saying that your interpretation would be completely wrong.

Forty Six presents a visual theme consistent with the research angle of the NCRC. As the first of what will hopefully be many new restaurants there near the campus, the establishment — which takes its name from the number of chromosomes in the human genome — is decorated with science-y things: beakers serve as vases on the tables; molecular diagrams of edible atoms (caffeine, chocolate, etc.) line the walls; the ceiling is crowned by famous quotes about knowledge and its pursuit; and (my personal favorite) the bathrooms are labeled "XY" and "XX". This is all done tastefully, of course. The first impression of a trendy big-city restaurant gives way only gradually and never completely to the geeky stuff, the theme providing fodder for discussion without distracting from the all-too-rare experience (for us, anyway) of feeling like you're at least a thousand miles away from fast food.

Amy and I had reservations for the first time slot (Forty Six opens at 5:30pm on Saturdays), and were promptly greeted and seated upon our arrival. This was just the beginning of over an hour of quality service from the staff of this restaurant. Our server, Mallory, maintained the ideal distance: we never had to wait for her to visit, and we never found ourselves waiting for her to go away. Keeping my water glass filled without my even noticing? That's the target, folks, and Mallory nailed it.

We began by ordering a "safe" glass of red wine — a Mondavi Cabernet — and the Duck Quesadilla appetizer. We enjoyed prompt delivery of both, plus a basket of bread with accompanying bean-and-tomato-based dipping sauce. The quesadilla — which was served with a black bean tapenade and a salsa featuring cucumbers and pineapple — was tasty, but unfortunately didn't last long between the two of us.

Salads were next. Amy ordered a half portion of the Warm Walnut Encrusted Goat Cheese Salad. She's a huge fan of apples in salads, and was not disappointed by the Granny Smith slivers in her selection. We hadn't really studied the menu with an intent to memorize it, so it was cute to watch her uncover tasteful surprises as she navigated the Balsamic-dressed greens. ("Ooh! Is that bacon?!") Only a chunk of goat cheese survived her appetite. I had a half portion of the considerably simpler Forty Six Salad: mixed greens, mandarin oranges, and chickpeas with a green goddess dressing. There was no exciting progression through my salad, but its taste and presentation made it worthwhile.

Forty Six offers several seafood dishes, but that's not really Amy's thing. She was eying the lamb, instead. Upon consultation regarding entree portion sizes, Mallory reminded us of Forty Six's healthy dining focus. However, she was confident that we could happily split an entree if we so desired. As it turns out, we so desired. Now, in our marriage, the proper cooking temperature of meat is always a point of contention. Amy's a "medium-to-medium-well" kinda girl; I'm a "rare-to-medium-rare" kinda guy; and there's not much overlap there. But this presented no problems for us tonight: the chef was cool enough to divide the chop prior to preparation and cook each half to order. Our bone-in New Zealand lamb chops arrived cooked to perfection, wading in a pool of Balsamic Demi Glaze, with roasted red potatoes, zucchini, and yellow squash cheering from the sidelines. The lamb was simply divine. Amy is a sucker for a good potato, and was thoroughly pleased by hers. I was looking forward to those squash sides, which I found good but perhaps a little more al dente than preferred. As we wrapped up the entree course, we were glad we had decided to share one. Apparently, the term "moderate portion sizes" as employed by Forty Six is open to some varying interpretations.

As any decent, God-fearing woman will attest, a delicious meal such as we were enjoying cannot be considered complete without dessert. Mallory presented the options: triple-layer chocolate cake; red velvet cake; banana pudding; and some others, all of which had much more interesting descriptions than what I can recall now. Amy rightly noted that "we always go for the chocolate-y stuff", and encouraged a different tack tonight: the red velvet cake (and a pair of cappuccinos). Mallory delivered all of this promptly (she was aware that we were trying to make the 7:00pm movie next door at the Gem). This cake was the absolute reddest red velvet cake I've ever seen; multi-layered, with a cream cheese icing between the layers, and a dollop of whipped cream on the top. Unfortunately, it was also considerably less moist than I'd hoped. The cake's components were all good, but those components shouldn't require me to hit my cappuccino as often as they did. (Alas, the cappuccino itself was unremarkable.) Overall, not the best finish to the meal.

Despite not being wowed by the dessert, Amy and I both left Restaurant Forty Six tonight feeling comfortably full yet immeasurably happier having shared this experience. I sincerely hope we have the opportunity to return there in the future.

Green church growth

2009-05-14T16:40:00.004-04:00

In my previous post, I ranted a little bit about today's raging green hype. But as implied there, Christians are not without some responsibility in all this business. So I'll turn this around on those of us who do claim to understand the purpose of Creation.

Green thoughts were fresh in my mind yesterday when a pastor friend of mine (Paul Batson) and I were driving toward a meeting in Charlotte. (We were off to meet with a couple of area pastors about church real estate.) So I found it interesting that Paul brought up the topic of how church properties tend to be some of the foremost examples of underutilization around. It's a reasonable claim, actually: a building big enough to hold hundreds of people in one giant space, plus additional classroom space, but actually used for, what, maybe six hours a week? Church, how do we deal with this monumental waste of resources?

I'll go further, and personalize this. My church has just entered into a building program because we're having trouble fitting people into the temporary accommodations currently in use after outgrowing the previous worship and educational space. (Did you follow that?) Was this the right decision? I mean, I understand the desire to avoid multiple worship services and multiple small group periods in the name of keeping all the membership together with that comfy feeling of unity. But might better use of existing space — and money — demand the opposite approach?

I'm no social scientist, but I've noticed that almost every time I check the number of friends that someone I know has on the social networking site Facebook, the number tends to hover between 200 and 300. This caused me to recall something I'd heard long ago about some theoretical maximum number of social connections that a person could maintain stably. I did some Googling around, and I think Dunbar's Number was that figure. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theoretized (based on the physical size of a region of the brain) that folks could keep about 150 such connections. (A more recent and more directly derived estimate of about 250 came out of research by anthropologists H. Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth.)

What does Dunbar's (or Bernard-Killworth's) Number mean for large churches? Does it explain why many people start to get antsy when their congregrations grow too large — why they start to feel disconnected? Does it allow an interpretation that having more moderately-attended church services benefits the sense of Christian community better than holding fewer gatherings of humongous crowds? And how does this all play into better use of church resources?

Green

2009-05-14T16:14:00.001-04:00

Everywhere I look I see the green. It's Spring, so my green lawn needs a bi-weekly whacking with my John Deere green lawn tractor (which is complicated by the low-hanging green-leafed limbs of some of the trees on our property). But if that was the only green I was seeing, that'd be okay. Unfortunately, it isn't.

"Going green" or "being green" or "living green" almost wholly consumes the mass media and the consumer marketplace. Right now, over half of the top results from a simple Google search for a word as common as "green" are about environmentalism, eco-friendliness, and so on. Green is the new black, or something like that.

Climate change (née global warming), carbon offsets, renewable energy, reduce/reuse/recycle, are worthy topics all. And as a Christian who believes that mankind was entrusted with wise stewardship of God-created, God-provided resources, I don't think I or anybody else holds a get-out-of-responsibility-free card. But I detect two big, green problems with much of the hype:

Man sees green — in financial opportunity. I honestly do not know who to turn to for trustworthy information about the state of the world; its climate and related trends; which problems are real, predicted, or flatly imagined; which solutions are viable; and so on. Part of the problem is that there's too much money in the eco-this-that-or-the-other trend right now. Do I really believe that every producer of goods is concerned about the world when they release some fascinating new eco-conscious version of their product? Hardly. Seems sex is getting a run for its money in the "marketing tools" arena these days.

God sees green — with envy. We have a jealous God who demands that all things be done for His glory. Not mine, not yours, and not Earth's, but God's glory. I think far too many people have traded being caretakers of creation (as a form of worshiping the Creator) for worship of the creation (Earth, humanity, Self, money, ...). That's busted.

There must be a better, more divinely-inspired way of exploring this problem space and its solutions, because being green — that is, naïve — enough to worship this rock or anything or anyone on it is a horrific non-starter.

ViewVC 1.1.0 (finally) released.

2009-05-13T12:37:00.003-04:00

Today, I finally got around to releasing ViewVC 1.1.0.

I know. And you're right — that's not the most uplifting lead-off line ever written for a technical blog. Sounds mostly positive (new release?!), with a hint of exasperation, and all shrouded in a mysterious cloud of why-should-i-care. Sorry about that. But allow me to explain.

ViewVC 1.1.0 represents — maybe misrepresents — three years of development on features introduced since 1.0.0 came out. I'm pretty pleased with the features, many of which were contributed by and/or willingly tested by volunteers. Here's an overview, taken from the official release announcement:

Extensible path-based authorization w/ Subversion authz support
Subversion versioned properties display
Unified markup and annotation views
Unified, hassle-free Pygments-based syntax highlighting
Subversion svn:mime-type property value honoring
Support for full content diffs
Standalone server improvements
Commits database management and query enhancements
Support for per-root configuration overrides
Optional email address obfuscation/mangling
Pagination improvements
... plus many bug fixes and additional enhancements!

"That's it? After three years' time, that's all we get?!"

It's okay. I've asked myself that a hundred times, too. It's a bummer, but I think I'm learning another hard lesson about open source projects: when a piece of software reaches a certain level of maturity, the developers-to-users ratio tends toward nil.

Before I ever started working on ViewCVS (which was what ViewVC was called at the time), it was already a well-established, widely used piece of software. CollabNet used it to display version control repositories in its CollabNet Enterprise Edition software suite. SourceForge.net was doing the same. It seemed that everybody had a copy of ViewCVS. The software was ubiquitous, worked well, and CVS wasn't changing significantly. And ViewCVS's developer participation reflected this plateau of innovation, too — I think there might have been two or three folks active at the time, mostly just fixing the occasional bug.

Seven years ago, I was tasked by CollabNet to add support for Subversion to ViewCVS. Subversion hadn't even released its 1.0 version at the time. Subversion was still this young, exciting, rapidly developing new entry into the version control world. I (with the help of others) did get Subversion support added to ViewCVS, and along the way I inherited primary maintainer-ship of the project. The project was renamed to ViewVC later to reflect the fact that it was no longer CVS-only, and I began focusing on fixing outstanding bugs and tracking changes in Subversion's new releases.

Fast-forward a few years. Now Subversion's rate of change — at least, in terms of what's of interest to a repository browser tool — is starting to plateau, too. And ViewVC's contribution rate is again reflecting that. Fewer active committers (< 2), investing less time (< 1 day/month), and with fewer volunteer contributions.

It's lonely here.

But it doesn't have to be. There still remain opportunities for improvement in ViewVC. Off the top of my head, I'd say adding support for other version control systems — Mercurial, Git, etc. — is a place where your expertise and effort would be not only appreciated, but required, if only because I don't use those systems myself. Scalability and performance improvements are always welcome. And I'd love to see ViewVC's MySQL integration expanded — why not use the database as a glorious cache of information that takes too long to harvest at runtime from the VC system?

So, while I might casually kick myself in the backside for finally and barely eeking out a new release of ViewVC, I do so understanding now that this may just be the way things go for mature software, thankful for ViewVC's many users, and happy to be working on free code.

Take ViewVC 1.1.0 for a spin. Kick the tires. Send feedback — positive and negative — to the mailing lists. I might be slow to respond, but "I'm not dead!", and neither is ViewVC.

.o O ( "I think I'll go for a walk … I feel happy." )

On hymns and praise songs

2009-04-21T23:53:00.004-04:00

Yep, this pretty much sums it up.

Liz, I know this doesn't count as "writing more on my blog", but at least I've given you something to read via my blog. Close enough?

I am a worship leader. (And so are you.)

2009-03-26T12:23:00.022-04:00

While contemplating God's love letter to artists, and directly on the heels of a message at church last night about the ways in which Satan attacks Christians, I find myself staring directly into the eyes of some of the same old insecurities that have haunted me over the past few months. I'm ready to 'fess up about those now.

I have some musical talent. I think I can even offer a pretty objective evaluation of that talent:

I sing, but my voice is thin in higher registers and can suffer pitch control problems in lower ones. And, probably due to vocal abuse, the clean tone I could produce ten years ago is giving way to something more crackly.
I play guitar, but am self-taught, and have never invested enough into learning either the acoustic or electric guitars to move beyond competence and into proficiency.
I'm not such a fine songwriter. I'm lyrically uninspired, and melodically challenged. But I'm really good at taking another person's song foundation and enhancing it (with neat arrangements, harmonies, counter-melodies, motifs, and so on).
I can wield digital audio software skillfully, and have even developed some pretty neat sonic "tricks" that have served me well. But I can't seem to produce output that sounds quite like I envision. (A recent attempt at something Counting Crows-ish was referred to — behind my back, mind you — as "yacht rock", with an apparent Air Supply influence. Ouch.)

I think it's healthy for folks to be able to recognize what they truly can and can't do. Wouldn't you agree?

Then here come the demons. "Why, again, are you helping to lead worship at yet another church? You don't fit the mold. Real worship leaders have hip haircuts; wear trendy clothes; are 10 lbs. underweight (instead of 20 lbs. over); have at least eight stomp boxes and a sound engineer devoted solely to their rockstar groove; sing with perfect pitch, tone, and timbre; and can spew God-honoring utterances while ripping fingers-of-fury blazing guitar solos. With their eyes closed and both hands raised to the heavens. You are no worship leader. You are, at best, background noise."

Oh, man, that stuff stabs. Plunge. Twist. Gush. (It hurts even now, just thinking about it.) But that's okay — I figured out some time ago how to protect myself from those barbs. See, I've dealt with this in the past by simply denying that I was (or was attempting to be) a worship leader. I was "just trying to help with the music program", or something like that. After all, the Enemy can't beat me in a race I refuse to run, right?

Sadly, I was wrong: I am defeated because I refuse to run. My responsibility as a created being — the tax on my very existence — is to worship the Creator. But my responsibility as a human is to lead (by encouragement, example, or otherwise) my fellow humans to do the same. My roles as a husband and father, especially, demand this service to my wife and children. And how can I be seeking loopholes in the Covenant when I've failed to lead those who I would consider some of my closest friends to worship God with me? No, whether I accept the label of "worship leader" or not, the responsibility is mine. God's will begins with thanksgiving and worship.

I appreciate the perspective Geoff Janes provides on the search for God's will at http://geoffreyjanes.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-is-gods-will-for-my-life.html. I should consider myself fortunate to have discovered — through the talents God has given me and the discernment of trustworthy others — a piece of God's extended will for me at this time: demonstrating that thanksgiving and worship with a guitar in hand at Providence Baptist Church. It may only be for a season — that is not mine to know. But at any cost, I must therefore seek only to do that will, and waste neither energy nor emotion chasing the unattainable stereotype constructed by the Enemy. My skills are not worthy of renown. Fortunately, they weren't fashioned for that purpose.

So today, I reject as invalid the notion that leading worship isn't my job. I accept as valid criticism that I've not been particularly good at this in the past. I apologize to my family and friends for not living a life that consistently and convincingly compels you to worship, too — love demands better than that. And as for that background noise I'm ever-so-capable of? I'm cool with that. But may it be a joyful noise from this day forward.

God's love letter to artists

2009-03-24T09:57:00.004-04:00

Jon Acuff (of Stuff Christians Like) writes today about God's love letter to artists. Like Jon, I've overlooked multiple times the Artist Ordination Ceremony there in the book of Exodus. I especially appreciate Jon's challenge to those gifted artistically to use their gifts to "rebuilt the temple" — to improve the physical, spiritual, and emotional lives of our fellow man. What better way to bring glory to God than to use the tools He has given to edify the objects of His greatest affection?

"Copying Isn't Theft", re-thunk

2009-03-23T20:44:00.003-04:00

Over at QuestionCopyright.org, I noticed an interesting public challenge: take one woman's little ditty about how copying isn't actually theft (because it doesn't result in the loss of the original item), and play around with it musically. So this afternoon, I spent a couple of hours doing just that.

Here are the lyrics of the song, originally by Nina Paley, with minor tweaks to fit the cadence of my version of the song:

Copying isn't theft. Stealing a thing leaves one less left. Copying it makes one thing more. That's what copying's for. Copying isn't theft. If I copy yours, you'll have it too That's one for me and one for you. That's what copies can do. If I steal your bicycle right out from under you, You'd have to take the bus. But if I just copy it, making one into two, There's one for each of us! Making more of a thing — That is what we call copying Sharing ideas with everyone That's why copying's fun. That's why copying's fun. Copying is fun.

And here's the recording, in a couple of different formats:

Heaven and hell

2009-03-16T10:00:00.003-04:00

I came across the following joke today in the comments section of a particularly good post on Jon Acuff's Stuff Christians Like blog. (Thanks Helen, whoever you are.) It's … er … something to chew on.

A man spoke with the Lord about heaven and hell. The Lord said to the man, "Come, I will show you hell." They entered a room where a group of people sat around a huge pot of stew. Everyone was famished, desperate and starving. Each held a spoon that reached the pot, but each spoon had a handle so much longer than their arms that it could not be used to get the stew into their own mouths. The suffering was terrible.

"Come, now I will show you heaven," the Lord said after a while. They entered another room, identical to the first - the pot of stew, the group of people, the same long-handled spoons. But there everyone was happy and well-nourished.

"I don't understand," said the man. "Why are they happy here when they were miserable in the other room and everything was the same?"

The Lord smiled, "Ah, it is simple," he said. "Here they have learned to feed each other."

Today, I feel like a successful husband

2009-03-05T09:42:00.004-05:00

Determining if you are succeeding as a husband probably involves some pretty unruly psychological calculus, but today I feel like a successful husband. Why? Did my wife express her love and devotion in some particularly convincing way? Was I presented a trophy etched with "Best Hubby 2009"? Is the Internet community hanging on my every tweet to find some sage advice on being an ideal mate? Not hardly. It's for much less obvious reasons that I feel this way.

Last night, as Amy and I left church, she had a huge smile on her face and she said, "I think I've found my place".

This was the first Wednesday evening service we've attended at our new church. After the service last night, Amy and I participated in practice sessions with the church's music team for the first time. The music director and pastor have graciously agreed to let us try to work to bring a slightly more contemporary flavor to the worship music of the church. So I added my guitar to the piano and keyboard sound already present, and Amy is donating her voice to the praise music and to the choir. It was the participation with the choir that had Amy so thrilled last night.

What has Amy's happiness as a musician to do with my success as a husband? Everything. I can rest well at night knowing that I have encouraged her to serve the church in any capacity she desires and feels gifted to serve. I have worked to arrange meetings with the pastor and music director so we can research this area of service. And I have consistently recognized, praised — and even constructively criticized, when necessary — Amy's wielding of her God-given musical talents. And someday, when God blesses her obedience and service to Him in this matter, I will be able to both share in her joy (three-point shot, nothing but net) and claim some of it for myself (the assist).

Could success as a husband really just boil down to using unconditional love to guide my wife toward the likeness and service of Christ?

Subversion desktop wallpaper

2009-02-26T10:09:00.004-05:00

I admit that I can be easily distracted into any number of time-swallowing tasks of dubious universal benefit. The last time I had an airport layover, I succumbed to another such distraction — designing Subversion desktop wallpaper for my new-at-the-time laptop. I didn't have a long enough layover to do anything graphically groundbreaking, and I'm not quite distracted enough right now to bother generating fifteen images of various sizes and resolutions. But here's what I have — do with them what you will:

meme — a bogus etymology

2009-02-23T13:24:00.003-05:00

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language defines the word "meme" like so

meme (mēm)
n. A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

The word apparently finds its origins in the same sorts of places as the words "mimic" and "mime" (meaning "to copy; to imitate"). But I couldn't help but notice that it looks like "me me" without the intervening space. "me me" … two "me's" … "me too!" (sometimes represented as <aol/>). When it comes to Internet memes, I suspect my bogus etymology of the word reveals more about the motives behind these information transmissions than the Greek can offer.

The year change came to America

2009-02-15T23:06:00.003-05:00

[If you think this post is about Barack Obama, you'll be sadly mistaken. This is my blog, by golly; Barack has his own.]

For Christmas, I got Amy something I'd wanted to get her for years: a couples devotional guide. We've each had our private times of Biblical study and prayer, but had never really formally had a dedicated daily time of joint reflection and discussion. So she was as thrilled as I expected when she unwrapped Moments Together for Couples (by Dennis and Barbara Rainey). This is a 365-day devotional. The entries are short — one page per day — with suggested discussion topics and a prayer guide. That seemed to me to be just about the right amount of effort to keep us interested without exhaustion, especially knowing that it would be at day's end when we'd likely be reading this thing.

On January 1, 2009, we read the first entry together. When we got to the suggested discussion topic, we got a lot more than we bargained for. What resulted was a two-hour long conversation that was really hard to have, but ultimately uncovered hidden expectations, disappointments, and wounds that we had no idea were present in our marriage.

Amy and I have always had a great marriage, but somewhere over the course of the past eleven years, small fissures had begun to form in the foundation of our relationship. The added weight of parenting and relocating from Chicagoland and stress caused by our church situation had exacerbated the problem. Fissures were becoming cracks of the worst kind — the kind that can't be immediately recognized on the surface. I don't believe we were at that moment at risk of catastrophe, relationship-wise. Our commitment to one another is non-negotiable and permanent. But it's a terrible thing to settle for "I do" or "I will" when "I will, and I really really want to" is within reach.

And so on January 1, 2009, the healing that comes from honesty, from openness, and from renewed devotion to one another and to God came to my marriage and, by extension, to America. I am having the very best year of my entire life. I feel like an entirely new man. I have immeasurably lower levels of stress, higher allotments of patience, and am finally learning to love as God wants me to love. I'm learning to trust God in ways I've never been able to before. And all those in my sphere of influence reap the benefits, too! How awesome is that?

Amy and I have faithfully attended to our devotional book every day of this year. We learned quickly that if we read and discussed immediately after putting the boys to bed (instead of just before we planned to go to sleep), we were much more likely to have enough energy to engage the discussion topics. We actually look forward to this time of our evening — it's one of the highlights of our daily routine.

Are there fissures, cracks, or full-fledged crumbling in the foundation of your marriage? I urge you — no, I beg you as a firm believer that a strong family is a strict prerequisite of a strong world — to invest dedicated attention to that problem. Talk to your spouse. Don't be afraid to lay everything on the line; to be completely vulnerable. Read books. Watch movies (such as the surprisingly fantastic Fireproof). And if your spouse won't talk to you, then talk to someone who truly understands the seriousness of the marriage commitment and can help you repair yours.

Experiencing God at Southbrook:Monroe

2009-01-18T22:23:00.001-05:00

Today my family visited Southbrook Church's Monroe campus (where our friend Geoffrey Janes is campus pastor). They've got a great thing going on down there, and I'd urge you to check out that church if you're in the area. It's a video campus, which I thought would be kinda weird, but honestly it really works well there. The live house band is an incredibly talented group of guys and gals — wow! We truly had a neat visit there.

The visit ended in a very strange way, however. As we were leaving the service, I felt for my wallet and found it missing. Now, on the way to the church, we'd stopped by the Dunkin' Donuts drive-thru for breakfast, and I remembered that I'd put my wallet into the console between the front seats of our car. I was a little nervous about having left my wallet in the car unattended, but, trusting that all would be well, we didn't bother to rush out of the church. We took our time, picking up the kids from the child care area, chatting with Geoff and his wife, Nancy, and so on. In fact, we were one of the last folks to leave the building that day.

On our way out to the car, I used the remote entry fob to unlock the doors from a distance. When I got to the car, my wallet was not in the console. Now, because I'd used the remote entry device, I couldn't tell if the car doors had been locked or unlocked throughout the church service. Had I left the doors unlocked, and my wallet in plain sight? We looked around the car for signs of anyone having rummaged through it — nothing. We looked around the car for my wallet — nothing.

I went back into church to see if maybe the wallet had dropped out of my pocket inside somewhere. Again, no luck. I spoke with Nancy and Geoff to see if anyone had reported a found wallet — no dice. After giving up on the search inside, I returned to the car. Amy and the boys had been continuing to search for and pray about the wallet. They looked under and around seats, in the glove compartment and console, under the console, around the car, and so on. Everywhere that could be searched, they searched.

I want to pause here to mention something that merits mention. Throughout this entire ordeal, I was perfectly calm. Anyone who knows me well will assume that either I am lying about that, or that I simply don't know what "perfectly calm" even looks like. I can't explain why (in psychological terms, anyway), but I was just confident that God would see us through this mini-crisis.

Anyway, as I got back to the car and heard from Amy that nothing had been found, I grabbed my cellphone to contact banks and credit card companies and start blocking card numbers. While thumbing though the address book, I asked (somewhat naively) if Amy had looked under the car seats. She said she had, showing me that — multiple times, even — she had looked right … what?! There it is! My wallet was sitting, pretty as you please, almost in plain view to the right of the console!

Clearly, some rejoicing and prayers of thanksgiving were in order. Once we finally calmed down, I drove the car over to the entrance of the church (which, by the way, we — and only we — had passed through three times in the past five minutes or so). I asked Amy to hop out and run inside to tell Nancy the good news about my wallet. As she stepped onto the sidewalk, I saw Amy bend down and pick something up. Can you believe it? There was a dollar bill lying in the middle of that white sidewalk! So not only did she get to tell Nancy the good news, but she was able to donate an extra dollar towards to the ministry of that facility! What an incredible, incredible experience it all was.

A neat day of worship and affirmation

2009-01-12T11:30:00.009-05:00

I wrote over on my family's blog about our recent decision to leave our church in Charlotte to pursue service in our hometown of Harrisburg. But I just wanted to share a little bit about how God made our last service there so rewarding and uplifting. Our prayer for Plaza has always been for its success as a church. But that's even more the case now as we leave that assembly and, in doing so, take our service energies and gifts with us. I mean, we have absolutely no delusions of being key to the success of that church, but practically speaking we've reduced the labor force there by some amount. And so our prayer is, "God, make that church flourish, if only as a clear reminder to us that Plaza is Yours, and that we are nothing but tools at Your disposal."

I was praying that prayer particularly hard prior to this past Sunday morning's service. I knew that the plan for the service involved some things that aren't typical. For one, I would be leading the "Praise and Worship" service segment with the electric guitar instead of the acoustic, which has never gone over very well there. Secondly, I knew that Amy and I would be announcing our departure, and doing so during a brand new "Family Time" segment of the service. Change, change, change all around, at a place historically hostile to such. But where I would have forecast disaster, God brought Himself to the party instead in a visible way.

Our Bible study class had a visitor, which is a somewhat rare event. After that class, we met still more visitors in the hallway. Four of the missionaries that the church supports happened to be in town and in attendance this week, and I later found out that of the twenty-some missionaries the church supports, my dad had wanted to speak with exactly those four people about a time-sensitive matter and was completely surprised to see them all there and on the same day, even. There was a spirit of happiness and hope in the air. Just prior to the service, I was standing outside the sanctuary getting some fresh air (I always feel like the heat is set too high in that building). I was approached by a dear lady who said to me matter-of-factly that our departure was no surprise to her — God had laid it on her heart a couple of weeks ago that we would soon be leaving in obedience to Him.

For the P&W segment of the service, I did something a little different. I asked that the house lights be turned down, and that the congregation engage in free worship. I wasn't going to ask them to stand, to sit, to sing, to listen, or to do anything except worship as they saw fit to worship. Wanna bang a drum? Come get it. Hiding a tambourine in your purse? Play it. Wanna lift your hands? Lift 'em. Wanna dance? Go for it. But by all means, focus on God instead of on the band. And you know? Many seemed to do exactly that. I felt like I was witnessing uninhibited worship for the first time in … well, in a very long time. And that atmosphere persisted through the entirety of the service.

I don't know what plans God has for Plaza Baptist Church. But I have to believe that if the spirit — or more accurately, the Spirit — that was present there this past Sunday morning sticks around, revival will come to that place.

From the "duh" department...

2009-01-12T11:11:00.003-05:00

My wife asked me this morning if I'd ever read — really read — her Suave shampoo bottle. Turns out I hadn't. I mean, not really, anyway. And in that act of utter negligence, I had overlooked an amazing claim that Suave makes about their product:

Cleans and conditions hair in one simple step — for less than more expensive brands.

That's funny stuff, or at least funnier than less funny stuff.

(Thanks, Amy, for keeping our marriage light-hearted. And full of extra body and shine.)

Dear Wal-mart, Welcome to the Digital Age

2008-12-18T14:00:00.005-05:00

A week or so ago, I finally got my family to sit still in our living room long enough to snap a quick family photo for use on Christmas photo cards we planned to send out this year. After editing the image just a bit to fix some weird shadows, adjust the colors, and try to fake some depth, I called Amy up to inspect the results. She was pleased: "It looks good. It almost looks like a professional photograph." So, I uploaded the image to walmart.com, selected the photo card layout I wanted, and ordered a bunch of them. Here's the photo:

I got a call a couple of hours later from the local Wal-mart Photo Lab:

"Hello, Mr. Pilato?"

"Yes I am."

"We're sorry, but we can't print your photo cards unless you bring us a release form."

"But ... but ... I took the picture myself with my little Canon S410!"

"We've been looking at the picture for a while, and it really looks professionally done."

There ensued another few minutes of hassling here, some of which revealed that if our fireplace had been black instead of gold, it wouldn't have looked so much like a faux matte background. Finally, the Wal-mart employee gave up some critical ground:

"Mr. Pilato, if you could just make a release form giving yourself permission to print the image, we'll do it. We just have to cover ourselves. I'm sure you understand."

"Wait. You want me to what? You know what — nevermind. I'll do it. Thanks."

I hung up the phone, paused for a moment to verify that I wasn't dreaming all of this, and fired up OpenOffice Writer. The following is the release letter I took with me when I picked up the photo cards the next day:

Even though I find it completely ridiculous that I have to do such…

I, C. MICHAEL PILATO, do hereby grant unlimited printing release to MYSELF for the following:

One (1) photo of my own family (Mike, Amy, Gavin & Amy), taken by myself with my own Canon Powershot S410 Digital ELPH camera (serial number **********) in my own living room, with the camera set to use the 10-second shot timer while sitting on a 6-inch mini-tripod atop one of my TV stands, in front of my fireplace – which is gold even though my wife wants it to be black (because that's what the previous homeowners liked, we suppose) – and Photoshopped on my wife's computer to crop the original image, brighten the photo, adjust the colors a little bit, and fake some depth by slightly blurring everything in the image except the human subjects in the foreground.

This release is fully transferable by the above named FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER, and a copy of this document should be considered adequate proof of release.

Note for printer: While I am not a professional photographer, I am a pretty darned good image editor, and pride myself on making photos taken with a sub-professional, non-SLR camera look as if they were taken by more advanced equipment. However, if further information or verbal confirmation is needed per your company policy, please do not hesitate to call me at ***-***-****.

I guess this bit of sarcasm is on file somewhere at Wal-mart now, protecting them from the threat of a copyright-related lawsuit.

Q4H: What did the seven thunders say?

2008-12-13T12:08:00.005-05:00

Today's reading has me in the book of Revelation. This book is an interesting read, as the whole thing is a massive vision given to a man named John who was living in exile on the tiny Greek island of Patmos. Is the vision full of allegory and metaphor, or is it to be interpreted literally? Well, that's an entirely different — and much larger — "question for Heaven".

Today, however, I have a more specific question. (Though, I won't be surprised if this turns out to be just the first of many such questions I have about this book's content.) In chapter 10, John is witnessing a strange event. A mighty angel is straddling earth and sea and toting a little scroll. Read with me from Revelation 10:2-4:

2 He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, 3 and he gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion. When he shouted, the voices of the seven thunders spoke. 4 And when the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write; but I heard a voice from heaven say, "Seal up what the seven thunders have said and do not write it down."

By now, my question is probably obvious: What was it that the seven thunders said, and why was John instructed not to reveal this?

I'd love to hear some scholarly opinions about this. Googling around turned up all kinds of not-so-defensible opinions, but maybe somebody else has a saner suggestion?

Faithless footnotes

2008-12-11T10:40:00.006-05:00

Mood: A little confused, with a hint of irritation.

The Bible I primarily read is The Student Bible, an NIV version "with notes by Philip Yancey and Tim Stafford." Today's reading has me in the minor prophet Micah's little book. As I started reading chapter 4, the text sounded a little familiar to me. Sure enough, I ran into one of the mini-sidebars in the text added for explanation presumably by Misters Yancey and Stafford. The note reads:

4:3 Parallel with Isaiah

Micah 4:1-3, which describes the wonderful future in store for the world, has an almost exact parallel in Isaiah 2:2-4. Isaiah must have quoted Micah, or vice versa, or perhaps both quoted a third unknown prophet. Both prophets spoke in Jerusalem at about the same time.

My questions of the note-writers are: "How can you possibly have crawled the entire Bible, adding scholarly notes at a rate of approximately one note per every two chapters, and come to the conclusion that the only way Isaiah and Micah could have both managed to reveal the word of the Lord near-identically is if they were sharing source material? Did it never occur to you that God might say the exact same thing to more than one person?"

Freedom and the legislation of morality

2008-11-13T10:41:00.011-05:00

The United States of America boasts of many things, but this country has prided itself foremost on being a symbol of freedom — for its own citizens, as well as for those around the world who live under the thumb of oppression — for as long as I can remember. We sing about liberty and freedom in our songs. We chant them in our pledges. We've inscribed them into our Constitution and pretty much every other defining document related to this great country. And yet, every day someone in this country — or perhaps everyone in some fashion — hurts because there's a giant hole where some aspect of what they would deem their personal freedom should be.

A few days ago, Americans in three states voted affirmatively on propositions which ban gay marriages in their states via amendments to those states' constitutions. The most newsworthy of these appears to be the passage of Prop 8 in California, a state typically viewed as a bastion of liberalism. Homosexuals and their supporters are crying foul, frusrated that freedoms and rights have, in their eyes, been stolen from them by a statistically unimpressive majority of voters. Opponents of gay marriage, however, will celebrate these amendments as victories in their struggle to prevent government approval of lifestyles they believe are immoral.

The infamous Roe v. Wade decision which legitimized abortion over 30 years ago is far from a matter of settled case law. People are still investing their entire lives into either fighting for the reversal of, or fighting for the preservation (and perhaps expansion) of, that ruling. Those in favor of the right to abort fight in the name of women's freedom; those against fight for the freedoms of the defenseless unborn.

Freedom and its pursuit takes us into many other hotly contested areas, often with serious consequences for poor decisions. There are lives at stake in foreign wars. There are lives at stake in our immigration situation. In the financial collapse. In our lack of energy self-sufficiency. In our education system. In our collapsing family structure. Everywhere you turn you find cold, hard realities that demand an answer. On my darkest days, I'd swear that freedom is literally killing us.

As I approached the voting booth on November 4, all of this was weighing on my mind, so much so that I felt absolutely joyless as I participated in what should have been an exciting thing. As an American, I have the ability to influence (albeit somewhat indirectly) the leadership of my country. When you really think about it, that's awesome. I didn't get to choose my parents. I have very little choice about the links in the chain of command above me at my job. But I get to help choose which people will sit at — and in the neighborhood of — the most powerful desk in the entire world. But despite the sheer power I held in my black pen as I marked that ballot (we don't yet have cool electronic voting systems here in Cabarrus County), I felt no joy. None.

Why is voting such a drag for me? What tempted me so strongly to stay home on Tuesday and sit this one out?

I guess I have to blame myself, really. I've deferred for so many years the formation of a solid, defensible opinion about a single topic, and that topic has in the last two Presidential elections demanded a clear stance. The topic is the role of Government in legislating morality, and specifically how to balance the freedom we all have to sin with the fact that even personal sin isn't good for society as a whole. Perhaps naively I'd like to think that Government could gracefully back out of most of those discussions, but practically speaking that doesn't seem to be the reality of the situation. Whatever the state of things, by not having a clear stance on the matter, I feel like I cheated my country out of a well-informed vote. For this, I apologize. Unfortunately, I stand today in no better position than I did this past Tuesday.

It's cliché to say that Election 2008 was yet another instance of being forced to "choose between the lesser of two evils". Mind you, I don't actually think either candidate is evil. But I've been taught that those things which are unethical or immoral (by God's standards, not by the shifting sands of society's ideals) are precisely the things which ought not to be legitimized, romanticized, or endorsed by Government. And so it's very hard to be happy about even the most charismatic and intelligent of candidates when he'll likely be a fat rubber stamp on the sin-endorsing legislation of his far-less-respectable Congressional peers. But then, it's equally hard to be happy about even the more experienced candidate when you believe his best ideas are someone else's and the rest of his ideas are only as well-formed as, well, my opinions on this matter — that kind of cluelessness in the uppermost ranks also leads, ultimately, to lost lives.

So, it seems I've got some homework to do over the next couple of years. Studying the writing of our country's founders. Studying our Constitution. Understanding freedom. Understanding "rights". And trying to do it all while remembering that "a more perfect union" is an overwhelming challenge when all of its parts are so far from perfection.

Got suggestions for my reading list?

Oh yeah? Well...

2008-11-10T00:03:00.004-05:00

About a week ago, a worship leader was introducing himself to me and my family. Gavin proudly routed around my legs to shake the stranger's hand.

"I'm Gavin," he offered. "And this," he said while pointing to Aidan, "is my brother Aidan. I'm five, and he's three."

Pretty routine, as introductions go, right? But then, after a brief pause, Gavin let Mr. Worship Leader know exactly how this particular introduction was unique — how at this moment the man was shaking the hands of a very cool family. Gavin aimed his grin at the man's face, and fired a single round: "And my Mom runs Linux."

Pascal's Wager found useless — news at (Hebrews) 11

2008-10-25T01:36:00.002-04:00

One common argument that Christians use to persuade atheists to risk a belief in God runs like so:

God is or He is not... Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

Of course, it typically comes out these days sounding a touch more linguistically modern: "If God exists and you believe in Him, you win big; if God exists and you don't believe in Him, you lose really big; and if God doesn't exist, it doesn't matter what you think. But why risk it?" The original quote sounds old because it is — it comes from 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal, and is commonly referred to as Pascal's Wager

I grew up hearing this sort of argument all the time. All the time. It wasn't until much later in life that I learned of its origins. And of its shortcomings. Namely, that the whole thing depends on God necessarily rewarding folks for believing in Him. Christians, of course, think that dependency is met by simple evaluation of the nature and recorded words of God — of course God wants us to believe in Him. But you can't play those cards with an atheist, since you have yet to establish that the God with said nature exists.

Now, if you're reading this and expect my next paragraph to be a newly revised wager that's logically solid, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I'm only here to say to that in my Bible reading for today, I came across a verse that — perhaps loosely interpreted — pretty much shoots Pascal's wager in the foot on the same grounds. Hebrews 11:6 says:

And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

Did you catch that? Not only does the author of Hebrews state up front that belief in God's existence requires faith — that is, cannot be proven empirically — but then he says that even if you get that far, you need still more faith to believe that God actually wants you to seek Him. This pretty much buries Pascal's Wager. But at least atheism can't say it was first to bury it.

"...there's just something about that name."

2008-10-21T10:48:00.004-04:00

A most peculiar thing happened in and around me on the flight back from Germany last Friday. I was pretty tired when I settled into seat 35C of Lufthansa flight LH428 from Munich to Charlotte. In fact, I fell asleep before the plane was pushed back away from the gate, and woke nearly an hour into the flight. As I was waking, a young child was just settling into her Daddy's lap for a nap in the seats to my right (and back a little ... a half-row offset). The family in seats 35D-35G was comprised of a man, woman, and two beautiful little girls of maybe 3 and 6 years of age. The youngest girl was the one nodding off as I woke. After taking in my surroundings (since my sleepy head clearly missed the chance to do so when I boarded the plane), I turned my attention elsewhere.

A couple of hours later, the little girl woke, whining. The whining turned to crying tinged with the occasional "Owie", and then the whole bit transformed into outright screaming. She was obviously in pain, not merely unhappy. My guess was that her ears were bothering her. She continued quite loudly expressing her pain for at least five minutes, during which she was passed from her father to her mother. Many in the cabin were rubbernecking to see what was going on, and when the mother was asked directly about the child's problem, I overheard the response: "She has an ear infection."

If there's one thing I knew at that moment, it was how painful flying with ear issues can be. On a recent return flight from California, both of my ears refused to "pop", and I was tormented for a half-hour by the nearly unbearable pain that results. It can be a bit like having nails driven into your ears, if you haven't experienced it. I tried everything at the time—drinking water, yawning, chewing gum, forcing high pressure into my ears. Nothing worked.

As I recalled that pain from just a few months ago and imagined what that precious little girl was going through, I realized something: my cheeks were cold, with trails of tears coming down them. Some may say it isn't "manly" to cry. I say it isn't manly to be so self-consumed that you risk not caring for the suffering innocent. And so I did the only thing I could do at the time: I prayed.

Now, I don't consider myself a prayer warrior by any stretch. I don't lay claim to any of supernatural spiritual gifts so celebrated in charismatic congregations today. I'm guilty of slapping the old "inJesusnameAmen" at the end of my utterances, and usually with nary a thought as to who Jesus is and why in the world we pray in his name, anyway. But the seeming injustice of a little girl in pain on this airplane was overwhelming to me at that moment, and so I prayed for her relief. And because I've been taught that there is power in the name of Jesus, and because at that rare moment I was able to believe wholesale that God could and would spare this child, I prayed specifically in the name of Jesus Christ for this relief to occur.

Now, if there another thing I knew at that moment, it was about waves of warmth. I take a medicine that can cause flushing incidents—basically, your body feels like it's on fire on the inside, your skin turns splotchy red, and for a couple of hours everything that touches you feels like it's made of straight pins. I also know that when I get emotional—especially when I'm angry—a wave of heat passes over my body and I'm a sweaty mess in three seconds flat. But at the very moment that I invoked the name of Jesus in my prayer, I felt something like that wave of heat pass over me, but without the typical tell-tale sweaty results. Almost immediately, the screaming girl in row 35 began to calm down, and soon was asleep in her father's lap again.

In the name of full disclosure, I noticed that at about the time I was praying, the parents were administering an oral medication. Maybe that stuff is powerful enough to dissolve that kind of pain in thirty seconds flat. I can only speak to the situation as I perceived it, and to the extent that I was involved.

To the family in row 35 of flight LH428 on Friday, October 17, I hope your little girl heals quickly. You as parents showed an incredible amount of patience in what could have been a stressful and embarrassing situation, and are to be commended for it. And while I'll never be able to say for sure whether God intervened in this situation, I am confident of two things: He is a just God who cares for people, and for once I did in faith exactly what I was supposed to do.

SubConf/Munich trip wrap-up

2008-10-20T15:55:00.008-04:00

Last week, after a wonderful beach vacation, I was in Munich, Germany for SubConf 2008. First of all, I'd just like to reiterate how weird it is to think that this little open source software project called Subversion has become such a worldwide ... thing. If you had asked me seven years ago how I saw all this playing out, I'm not exactly sure what I would have said, but I can pretty much guarantee the words "worldwide user conference" would not have been a part of it. And this year—bonus!—we were able to combine the user conference with a simultaneously happening developer summit.

The start of the week found me still awake, very sleepy, and frantically working to setup a new work laptop. We got back from vacation Saturday afternoon, picking up this new laptop from Amy's parents' place before we arrived at our own home. We unpacked the car, began sorting the dirty laundry, and started the night-long process of cleaning every article of clothing in the house. While the washer and dryer were doing their thing, I was shrinking partitions and installing Ubuntu Linux and copying data from backup. So, with three hours of sleep, we headed off to church on Sunday morning. And after church, we came home just long enough for me to pack some last-minute stuff and drive off to the airport.

Now, the flight from Charlotte to Munich is not a short one, but I was only able to grab about an hour-long nap. I arrived in Munich on Monday morning, took a pair of trains to the Riem stop, and began the half-mile walk from the train station to the NH Hotel (where I was staying, and where SubConf was held). Along the way, I passed some friends headed into Munich for some sightseeing: Mark Phippard, Paul Burba, and Hyrum Wright. We agreed to let me check in and drop off my stuff so we could all head out again together.

Munich is a beautiful city, and we had a great time trampsing around it. Much of what I saw was stuff I'd seen last year, but it was great to revisit these places with a different group of folks. We got a few rounds of laughs at Hyrum's "mission", which was allegedly about picking up some textbooks for his professor from a German bookseller, but wound up looking strangely like a shakedown of a nice elderly German lady in a faux antiquities warehouse. And Mark's running narration of a pseudo-history of Germany was a steady source of humor (though, I do fear for his children's future social studies grades).

On Tuesday, the developer summit began. We chronicled much of the happenings there at http://svn-summit.open.collab.net/, so I won't repeat them here. But I think overall the meeting (which continued Wednesday and Thursday, too) was useful for all. Tuesday night the devs sat in a horseshoe shape in front of sixty or so Subversion users to "get drilled" with questions and complaints, but the drilling never happened and folks were (for the most part) quite polite in their feedback.

SubConf proper began on Wednesday. I mostly stayed with the other devs in the summit room. I gave the last talk of the evening in one of the tracks, just providing a heads up about what we expect to be released in Subversion 1.6, as well as a little bit about what's currently in the oven for future releases. As always, I was a touch nervous when I first began the talk, but I got over it quickly enough. Honestly, I'd prefer to just field questions so that I know that what I'm saying is at least addressing one person's needs, rather than dumping my previously prepared information in the laps of folks who may or may not care at all.

Thursday I again chose to attend the developer summit rather than the SubConf presentations.

I still managed to find my way into many side conversations with non-devs over the course of the three days, so I definitely would not count this as a missed opportunity to connect with Subversion's users. And of course the nights ran long as I was hacking on Subversion's 'fs-rep-sharing' logic, releasing ViewVC 1.0.7, and so on. When I finally landed in Charlotte Friday evening after a ten-hour flight, I think I'd had about twenty hours of sleep in six days. But it was so worth it!

Here are some of the highlights for me, in no particular order:

The Subversion Developer Round Table, which I half-suspected was going to be underpopulated and shy on audience participation, was neither. Conference organizers were surprised by the turnout, and there were almost no moments of awkward silence.
Meeting some of the other developers I hadn't met before: Erik Hülsmann, Bert Huijben, Neels Hofmeyr, and so on.
As Hyrum noted on his blog, the somewhat spontaneous emergence of the idea of "packing" Subversion FSFS revision shards was both unexpected and a source of pleasant reflection throughout the conference.
High-bandwidth discussion with other developers. I love my wife and kids, and they are great sounding boards for development ideas, but the feedback quality is — somewhat lacking.
Erik H. rockin' the red corduroy pants, red sweater, and red-and-white striped shirt beneath. I can't pull off style like that.
Souvenir (and dinner) hunting with Hyrum on Thursday evening.

Oh! And as a special treat, I got to design the T-shirt for the developer summit. It's pretty geeky, a cartoon about the resolution of so-called "tree conflicts". But then, why shouldn't a geek gathering have a geeky commemorative shirt? (By the way, I did the entire design in Windows using OpenOffice Draw, with final touch-ups in PhotoShop—much thanks to the folks at Contagious Graphics in Charlotte who fast-tracked this order through while I was at the beach.)

Mistrials in the Court of Public Opinion

2008-10-01T10:45:00.011-04:00

Last night, Amy and I watched an hour-long preview of the DVD release Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West. (I'm not sure how you can call an hour-long movie a "preview" when the full version is only 17 minutes longer, but I digress.) We got the DVD from a friend who lives in Charlotte, who had gotten it via its inclusion in a recent edition of The Charlotte Observer. We were in the mood for a movie, but it was getting late and we didn't want to invest in a two-hour romantic comedy, so we popped this disk in instead.

As a piece of documentary, it was interesting. Not the most exciting thing in the world, but definitely interesting. The film begins with a pretty clear explanation that it is talking exclusively about a particular minority subgroup of the Muslim population that promotes and engages in acts of violence, not about the majority of Muslims who are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. Most of the film consists of footage from Iranian and Arabian television broadcasts, with bits of commentary from a handful of folks (a former PLO terrorist, the daughter of a suicide bomber, an anti-Semitism expert, an ex-Hitler Youth officer, etc.) between clips. The television footage — especially the stuff showing children passionately reciting jihadist poetry and huge assemblies of people chanting "Death to America" — are intriguing enough. But the commentators serve to add the "personal touch" plea for awareness and action by all people (Muslim or otherwise).

After the film was over, Amy and I were both of the same frame of mind. You might assume we were angry at Islam or something. You'd be wrong. Our mindset was one of sadness on behalf of the children taught to hate and kill in the name of Allah. We had brief discussion about the movie, then turned off the lights to go to sleep. But just as we were doing so, Amy wanted to know more about the folks who produced the film. I had noticed that the copyright on the disc was for 2006, which seemed odd as I was seeing it for the first time in 2008. I had even rhetorically asked Amy earlier, "Why is this just now coming out, seven years after 9/11?" And we both wondered if the Observer was the only newspaper that participated in this distribution. So we got back out of bed to hover around the computer.

The movie's website wasn't able to quickly answer the question about which newspapers participated in the distribution of the DVD, so we started Googling around. (We later found some of that information on the movie's Wikipedia page.) We visited a handful of top results in our Google searches, and every site we found was criticizing the film, its producers, or the recent distribution. But what turned our mood from sadness into frustration was that none of the criticism was about factual inaccuracies in the film, but about tangential issues. Most of what we saw was one of the following:

Complaints from Muslim groups saying that the film enforces a negative stereotype of all Muslims and would encourage hate crimes against Muslims. I dunno. The movie does carry the disclaimer I mentioned at the beginning of the film, carries video footage of Tony Blair echoing the same sentiments in person at the end of the film, and everywhere in-between the commentators are careful to speak about "radical Islamists" or "jihadists" and appealing to the peaceful majority of Islam-dom to decry the violence of the radical wing thereof. I guess I don't see how this piece of film could possibly affect the Muslim stereotype more than is already done every time one of the Islamic terror groups gets mentioned on the evening news for perpetrating their violence d'jour.
Complaints that the film is clearly a political piece promoting a particular candidate for the U.S. Presidency. But I don't recall the movie or its packaging ever mentioning any such candidates or political parties. Unless I'm mistaken, the only times you see American political figures in the film is in radical Muslim propaganda footage portraying George W. Bush as evil (which is pretty common in American media, too). The claim is apparently that the film's backers are decidedly pro-McCain, anti-Obama. But that sentiment is simply not present in the film itself. You'd need out-of-band information to draw that conclusion, the most influential of which is the viewer's already-formed opinions about a particular candidate's ability and willingness to respond to the described threat.

In other words, what we quickly found by Googling around was the online equivalent of a mistrial.

To the Muslims concerned that documentaries on radical Islamic jihadists will enhance negative stereotypes of all Muslims: It is certainly disappointing that that's probably true for some viewers. Every documentary about Death Row enforces negative stereotypes of black males in some folks' minds. Every documentary about gang violence enforces negative stereotypes of the ethnic groups represented in those gangs. Every documentary about The Crusades or Christian abortion clinic bombers enforces negative stereotypes of Christians like myself, too. (Sheesh, the media tends to negatively portray even peaceful, law-abiding Christians, for that matter.) I think people cling to stereotypes because we all inherently like to categorize stuff, and stereotypes are the intellectually easy way to do that categorization. The questions that all folks who are victims of unfair stereotypes must ask of themselves is, "What am I doing to correct or refine that inaccurate stereotype?" Are you and I and the Jew and the black man and the Latino and the [insert stereotyped person here] supporting our respective stereotypes with our lives, or do we daily disprove that we are what the weak-minded claim we are? Do we speak out against the crimes committed by people "like us", or does our silence allow folks to assume we support those crimes?

I don't know if there's some political agenda behind the recent distribution of this film. My heart tells me there probably is. But if that's the point that everyone is dwelling on, am I alone in thinking that's sorta bad? Is the documentary a giant lie? If so, discredit it with the truth. But if it isn't — if, in fact, radical Islam is as the DVD suggests a historical recurrence of the pattern last seen in the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Nazi Germany — does it ultimately matter why the documentary was distributed? Would not the terrorism itself be considered a somewhat more high-priority issue than who paid what to inform us about it and why they did so? One would think so.

ALL YOUR TEXT-BASE ARE BELONG TO US

2008-09-29T09:14:00.004-04:00

I was thinking about some T-shirt designs this weekend, and one train of thought derailed into the following diversion. Enjoy.

Background: A couple of months ago, Greg Stein announced his intent to return to Subversion development, among other things. Since then, Greg's been undertaking a beast of a task: redesigning Subversion's working copy management library. As for the "All your base…" stuff, see Wikipedia's "All Your Base" page for more on what that's all about.

Greg: sorry, buddy, I couldn't help myself. Glad to have you back.

Righteous war: snapshot of a five-year-old's mind

2008-09-25T12:06:00.005-04:00

My five-year-old son, Gavin, just came upstairs to my office — a pint-sized bundle of tornadoesque energy and noise. Today "the good guys" and "the bad guys" are flying fighter jets (which look, ironically, exactly like the ASL handshape for "I love you"). Now, I'm still not terribly comfortable with my kids embracing imaginative play involving weapons. On the one hand, I know that boys — especially at my boys' ages, and unlike their female counterparts — need rough and tumble play with strong male role models as part of proper gender identification. On the other hand, I don't want my little guys desensitized to unnecessary or unlawful violence (though I'm fighting an uphill battle against the entirety of mainstream media in this, it seems). So I decided to interrogate Gavin about his play today.

"What makes the Bad Guys bad?" I asked.

"The Bad Guys are the ones doing bad things, Daddy."

"Okay, but sometimes you do bad things, too. So do I. So does Mommy. So do your Good Guys, I'm sure."

"But my Bad Guys are the ones with the guns."

"Your Good Guys have guns, too, though. I dunno, Buddy — I can't see any difference between your Good Guys and your Bad Guys."

At this, Gavin paused. You could almost smell the grease in his mental gears as they warmed into steady rotation. Finally, he asserted, "But the Bad Guys are using their guns to hurt other people, and the Good Guys are trying to help those people."

"Well done, son. Have fun playing."

Version Control With Subversion, 2e

2008-09-14T15:39:00.004-04:00

The second edition of Version Control With Subversion went off to the print shop this past Friday, and you can already read the official O'Reilly digital version thereof on their Safari Books Online service. This second edition covers Subversion 1.5.0 and all its new features, including merge tracking, changelists, sparse directories, SASL support, and so on.

Click to Buy

I dunno how my co-authors (Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick) feel about it, but I am really glad to be finished with this edition. Authoring a book — even just filling in the holes of an existing book for a second edition thereof — is a really time-consuming process! Our first edition was published in 2004 and covered Subversion 1.0. So that meant we needed to have the text updated to cover four more years' and four more major releases' worth of Subversion's maturation. Granted, we'd been more-or-less keeping our text up to date with each release of Subversion as it came out. But the text authorship was nothing compared to the copyediting stages and the tight production schedule there at the end.

Lest anyone misunderstand me, I want to state for the record that all the folks we interacted with at O'Reilly are awesome. Not only were we able to write our book in a completely open format (DocBook XML), but O'Reilly now does all the book fancification in the same format. They were cool enough to give us commit access to their production repository so we could more quickly port changes between our book source files and their copies, and vice-versa. O'Reilly rules!

The pain for us was the scheduling — both the overall length of the process, and the final drive to completion. We were originally contracted to put out a book about Subversion 1.4. But it started looking like Subversion 1.5 would be released about the same time as our 1.4-based book. Well, clearly it didn't make sense to do that, so we negotiated with O'Reilly a change of plans — to publish a book that covered Subversion 1.5 instead. Sadly, Subversion 1.5's schedule slipped. And slipped. And slipped some more. Scope creep and eleventh-hour code reworkings there meant more writing and re-writing for us, and, of course, delayed the whole publishing schedule. And it would have been worse were it not for some incredible volunteer technical reviewers that stepped up to help double-check our work.

But enough of my whining. The point of this post is to announce that the hard work and late nights has finally paid off. We have a second edition at the print shop right now, and only three months after Subversion 1.5.0 was released. We've already gotten some great early feedback on the new edition (the book itself is developed in the public under an open license at http://svnbook.red-bean.com), so we are optimistic that this new edition will serve as a useful addition to the libraries — physical or digital — of Subversion users of all flavors.

Mission accomplished. Well, mostly.

2008-09-13T22:56:00.006-04:00

My wife's computer is now running Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (hardy heron). She no longer has any dependency on Microsoft software. I didn't think it was possible, but I might have fallen just a little bit more in love with her.

Actually, the sad truth is that for now I'm the one that still has a couple of Windows dependencies. (Those would be easily remedied by a conversion to Apple products, but that's never struck me as worthwhile maneuver.) I maintain a personal wiki page that tracks the pieces of software I need to be available (and not awful) on Linux before my dependency is broken, and over the years progress has been steadily made in that space. So, if you're a FOSS junky and you work on multi-track audio software, multi-track video editing software, DVD authoring software, or a good Microsoft Money/Quicken clone, you have my undivided attention!

Control at Any Cost, Revisited

2008-09-11T13:59:00.004-04:00

In Control At Any Cost: Copyright vs Christian Rock, I told the story of my school-of-hard-knocks introduction to the Internet, copyright, and the often ugly places where the two collide. Judging by the banner I saw today atop pwarchive.com — a popular Christian praise and worship music website — I'd say that not much has changed in the decade since those events occurred.

Pwarchive.com is a site similar in some ways to OLGA or the old CCM Guitar Music Archives, but much more technologically advanced. The site maintains a database of common Christian praise songs, and tracks separate bits of metadata about each song (such as its lyrics, chords, stanza information, etc.). You can hide or show each class of metadata independently of the others as you see fit, and — perhaps the handiest feature of all — you can even dynamically transpose those chords into arbitrary keys.

Pwarchive.com has — for as long as I've been aware of it, anyway — been sensitive to copyright matters. Many of the songs don't allow you see the lyrics at all, but instead display floating guitar chord names atop the spots where lyrics would have appeared. If you're familiar with such a song, that tends not to be much of a problem, especially since you can generally find the song's lyrics elsewhere online pretty easily. But I call out this fact about pwarchive.com to make a point: the folks running it appear to be genuinely trying behave within the bounds of current copyright law.

And so it was disappointing to me to find the following notice near the top of pwarchive.com's pages today:

Here's what that pink notice box says:

Notice
Pwarchive has been contacted by the Church Music Publishers Association and have been asked to remove all lyrics from the site due to copyrights. Over the next few days, work is going to be done to comply with this. Please join the mailing list for all future updates. Want to help?

Additional details on this matter can be found on the copyright page which will contain future updates. Sign the petition to as CMPA members to grant licenses to Pwarchive.

I'm well aware of many of the criticisms leveled at the so-called Christian music industry. I'm familiar also with the "Christian artists have to pay bills, too" defense of this type of pre-litigation action. And, as the fine folks over at QuestionCopyright.org can attest, notices of this sort are (unfortunately) common indications of "business as usual" in the Digital Age. Few — if any — industries are exempt from the complexities of copyright law and its enforcement.

But I struggle to understand what causes a mostly evangelical subculture to actually go out of its way to prevent the most widespread dissemination of its message possible today via the Internet. Why are Christian musicians giving up their rights to publishers like this? Or at least, why are they doing so in ways that permit those publishers to restrict the viral expansion of music and lyrics penned — if the artists themselves are to be believed — to honor God and reach others with Christ's story of sacrifice? Jesus' made some observations about the ultimate extent of true loyalty, found in Matthew 6:24 (and again in Luke 16:13): "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money." Which master is being served here?

I signed the petition. If you, too, think the CMPA isn't doing "what Jesus would do", perhaps you'll sign it, too.

Flooding in Harrisburg

2008-08-27T11:47:00.006-04:00

My town of Harrisburg, NC — and indeed the entire region — has been in a state of moderate drought for the past, I dunno, fourteen months or so. So when we got a solid day of rain yesterday, Amy and I were thankful for it. Who wouldn't be? As helicopters hover over my head right now, I'll tell you who wouldn't be: our neighbors down the street.

Our house is on one of the higher pieces of ground in a neighborhood that is bordered on one side by a creek prone to occasional flooding. So we were blissfully unaware until a few hours ago, as we went about our morning, that just 200 yards away were several homes whose first floors were under water! Amy had left the house to take the boys to Romp n' Roll for some activities, but called my cellphone shortly thereafter saying she was coming back home — she couldn't go anywhere without hitting flood waters.

From our neighborhood, the rest of the world is accessible (by road anyway) only via Stallings Road. To the west, Stallings Road was flooded across some low-lying cow pastures; to the east, it was flooded at the bridge over that creek that borders the neighborhood. Our neighborhood and the one just west of it are now effectively on an island! It's an island full of people who couldn't get to work today. And, sadly, it's an island not quite big enough (or high enough) to hold all the houses in the neighborhood.

We took a walk down the street to see the damage and find out if there was anything we could do to help. Here are some photos I snapped while there. You can see in some of the photos how high the water line was before we even got down there to take the pictures.

I was told that one of the houses now under water was for sale, set to close today. And while the potential buyers are probably glad they didn't sign yesterday on the place, the sellers have certainly had their world turned upside down. My mother called to tell me that in her neighborhood across town (which is bordered by another creek), the water level rose by over ten feet. Apparently, there are crews acting there in boats to get people out of their homes. And another section of the same creek that runs by my mom's neighborhood flooded over yet another key road, according to the Lathams.

My neighbors appear to be in good spirits, and helping each other. I imagine that elsewhere in Harrisburg, NC, folks are doing the same for their neighbors. And that's just … Right.

Context. It really does matter.

2008-08-15T17:16:00.003-04:00

Context is everything.

3 Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed.

Yes! Prosperity Theology! Name It and Claim It! "Dear God, I commit unto You my big plans to win the lottery without even playing it! I know You have the power to accomplish this in my life, so now I await your outpouring of success."

4 The Lord works out everything for his own ends — even the wicked for a day of disaster.

Doh! "So, um, God … scratch that last one, will You?"

(Quotes taken from Proverbs 16, verse 3 and subsequent verse 4.)

Q4H: Why does God allow suffering?

2008-08-04T08:08:00.004-04:00

I was reminded this morning of a question I think most theists — and many atheists, when in let's-just-suppose mode — ask at least once in life: Why does God allow suffering? What's the deal with all the floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and so on? I certainly have asked this question of Heaven myself.

Some time ago I was pointed to an online audio clip of an NPR interview with John Piper, a pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can listen to the interview yourself at http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Interviews/1678_The_NPR_Tsunami_Interview/. I think Piper's responses throughout the entire interview are amazing — his mastery of Scripture and natural ability to deploy it as needed are incredible. But two threads in this interview really stuck with me:

God is sovereign. Not only can He do anything, He rightly and justly may.
God is always mingling judgment and mercy, both of which are useful for bringing people back to Himself.

Judgment and mercy. The Flood and the Ark. The sweeping through Egypt of the Death Angel and the passover sacrifice. The wages of sin (death) and the gift of God (eternal life through Jesus Christ).

What brought this interview to mind today was a bit from this morning's Bible reading. I'm in the book of Job, now. If you don't know Job's story, it runs something like this:

Once upon a time, there was an extremely wealthy and extremely righteous man named Job. Job had a wife, kids, and crazy amounts of livestock and servants. Job pleased God.

One day, Satan and God were chatting, and God asked Satan if he'd noticed what a good, righteous guy Job was. Satan replied, "Well, of course he's righteous. You've given him everything he could possibly want and more. He only loves you because you're good to him." So God granted Satan permission to do whatever he wanted in Job's life, so long as Job himself was granted immunity. Satan used his temporarily extended leash to kill all of Job's children and most of his servants, and to have his livestock stolen by raiders.

Job was shellshocked, but remained faithful to God (a fact that God bragged about to Satan). Satan said to God, "Yeah, yeah, okay, so he passed the test. But that's only because you didn't let me touch his body." So God fed Satan a few more feet of tether, and Satan struck Job with terrible sores over his entire body.

Thirty-five chapters' worth of (really poetic) dialogue fly by. Job's bummed but still faithful, his wife isn't offering much by way of help ("Just curse God, die, and get it over with already!"), and he has three friends who've come by to cheer him up but seem to offer more mouth than mind. Finally, God Himself comes[1] to speak to Job and his buddies, to set the record straight, and ultimately to restore Job's wealth and rebuild his family. And they all live happily ever after.

Anyway, while reading about Job this morning, I noticed this bit from Job 12:13-15:

To God belong wisdom and power; counsel and understanding are his. What he tears down cannot be rebuilt; the man he imprisons cannot be released. If he holds back the waters, there is drought; if he lets them loose, they devastate the land. [emphasis added]

Why do we — why do I — find it so easy to assign credit (blame) to God for the holding back of good things, yet routinely fail to assign credit (praise) to Him for holding back the bad stuff, too? God may let many problems come our way, but just think about the ones He didn't let come. Two things routinely taught in Christianity are that mankind has a supernatural adversary (Satan) who seeks our ultimate destruction, and that Satan has been given dominion over the earth. How long do you suppose we'd survive if those were the only two factors at work here? So why do we remain? Mercy.

Job had it right. After Round One...

At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised." In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing. [Job 1:20-22]

...and then after he was bodily afflicted:

[Job] replied [to his wife], "You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?" In all this, Job did not sin in what he said. [Job 2:1-3]

[1] By the way, I love how God enters the scene here in Job 38:1-3: "Then the Lord answered Job out of the storm. He said: 'Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.'"

Justincasion

2008-07-15T08:59:00.006-04:00

Over at Stuff Christians Like today, Jon Acuff is remixing one of his previous posts on the topic of subtly finding out if others drink beer, too. It's a humorous look at the awkwardness that exists when two Christians with potentially differing views about the morality of alcohol consumption try to discern each other's beliefs without revealing their own.

I left the following comment on his post:

Jon, this issue is just one of many flavors of a general problem with the Church called "justincasion". Not to be confused with "justification" (remember "just as if I'd never sinned"?), justincasion ("just in case I ever sin") is quite the opposite. Its symptoms include blurred vision, inaccurate depth perception, paranoia, and an odd fascination with sidewalk chalk. To best learn how to identify a person (or organization) suffering from justincasion, let's look at an example. Say, alcohol consumption.

Two people -- one with justification, one with justincasion -- read the same Bible. They both see the same texts prohibiting drunkenness, both read about Jesus turning water into wine, etc. Now, the person with justification recognizes the value of what these scriptures offer: the freedom to drink what he wants so long as he keeps his head, the freedom to celebrate (rather than stifle) important cultural gatherings such as weddings, protection from the consequences of bad decisions made with judgment impaired by alcohol, etc. To the justified person, the law exists to give freedom, not to restrict it.

Enter the justincased guy. The minute he sees words like "not" or "never" in the text, his paranoia kicks in. He begins to sweat the definitions of words such as "drunk" and "wine" and ... "and". While still a little woozy from this sudden onset of Heavenly pressure and the threat of eternal damnation, he does the only thing he knows how to do -- he reaches for his sidewalk chalk. He eyeballs (as best as he can in this state) a "safe zone distance" from the forbidden thing, doubles the distance "just in case", and then draws a circle at that radius around this particular evil on the ground. That line is never, ever, to be crossed. All must remain outside the circle.

Of course, the problem with said circles is that, once you've drawn one around each and every sin in the Book, you find there really isn't all that much of the Earth left not in one of those circles. Getting from one place to another requires carefully planning and often some quite complex acrobatics to avoid falling inside one of the circles and (of course) certain death. The law becomes a burden, causing these people to spend all their time looking down at the ground and the circles instead of looking up to their God.

In fairness to some, there was an important freedom I neglected to mention that is available to the justified person: the freedom to avoid drink altogether for any personal, non-judgmental reason that seems fit to him. This includes abstaining in the presence of others who don't understand the other freedoms, or avoiding things which he from past experience knows leads him into temptations he cannot resist. When in doubt, our relationships with each other should be of far more concern than our relationship with the bottle.

Pranks are fun (and fun is violent)

2008-07-14T12:09:00.005-04:00

My wife, Amy, and I have a very playful relationship. We've always placed great value on smiles and laughter, and we want to create for our children an environment which encourages such. Marital roles are a complicated-yet-structured thing, and the overarching goals of the design involve mutual love, respect, co-edification, and a joint effort towards holiness. But when pressed for a quick explanation, we'll skip the philosophy of it all, and tell you that marriage ought to be full of good clean fun!

One way in which we have fun is by playing mild pranks on each other. For example, a few nights ago we were playing Monopoly in our living room. Now, our living room has through the North Carolina summers a tendency to attract such unsavory and unwelcome guests as house centipedes (which we lovingly refer to as "thirty-leggers") and American cockroaches. From June to August, we very rarely enter that room without a cursory scan of the ceiling and fireplace area for "critters". Lately, we haven't seen as many of them, but this didn't stop Amy from — in the middle of our Monopoly game, with my back to the fireplace, and with her giggling about something else — pointing behind me and gasping as if she'd seen the largest dual-headed, ten-legged, armor-plated mutant cockroach in the world about to dig into my skull for some cranial pudding. To say that I "was startled" and "jumped" would be an understatement. Truth be told, I was lucky to survive the ordeal with wearable underpants!

My opportunity for revenge came today. I was working downstairs, and Amy went upstairs to shower before lunch. I gave her some time before heading up after her, then — figuring she was already in the shower — burst into our bathroom feigning a child's voice and saying, "Mommy! Mommy!" Well, she wasn't in the shower. She was almost in the shower, standing on the bathroom scales. At my outburst (or is that, "inburst"?), she grabbed for a towel to cover herself so quickly that she broke the towel rod off the wall. Once she realized it was only me (and the towel rack finished bouncing off the walls and floor), we had a great laugh about it. Oh, sure, I still got the requisite and well-deserved smack, but it was all so worth it.

Subversion 1.5.0 commit history, visually

2008-07-01T21:55:00.005-04:00

I was recently introduced to the code_swarm project, which produces this nifty software for generating visual representations of version control repository activity. For kicks, I pieced together a visual history of Subversion 1.5.0. Enjoy! (You might need to view it in fullscreen mode to actually read the committer names and datestamps.)

Subversion 1.5.0 (code_swarm) from C. Michael Pilato on Vimeo.

Aaron Spuler — making Mozilla smile

2008-06-28T23:26:00.005-04:00

I've been using Aaron Spuler's Mozilla themes for a few years. I don't know the guy, but for some reason his graphical vision just leads him to places that put happy thoughts in my head. (This is rather in contrast with the default Firefox and Thunderbird themes, which are, shall we say … uninspired.) Anyway, peruse his (free) wares at http://www.spuler.us, and consider sending him a small donation if you dig it, too.

Subversion 1.5 released

2008-06-19T11:01:00.001-04:00

Subversion 1.5 — the single largest post-1.0 release of Subversion — was released today. The long wait is over.

And boy do I mean "the long wait". Over two years have been invested into this release, with most of the effort surrounding the flagship feature it delivers — semi-automated tracking of merges. In that time we've added nine fantastic new full committers to the project, a handful of partial committers, and seen contributions from many other volunteers. And I've nothing but praise for Hyrum Wright, our unpaid, volunteer release manager, who patiently endured not just alpha and beta releases but eleven (yes, *sigh*, eleven) release candidates.

One personal benefit of this lengthy process has been the opportunity to speak publicly on the topic several times. From local LUGs and developer groups, to SubConf in Munich last October, to JavaOne CommunityOne last month in San Francisco, and in various blog posts and webinars, I've been able to talk about Subversion 1.5's new features and improvements. I'm not a particularly suave public speaker, but I was surprised to find that I wasn't nearly as nervous about doing these gigs as I thought I would be. But more importantly, each of these public appearances allows me to talk with other folks I've never met before and hear about their excitement around Subversion and the other tools in the Subversion ecosystem. In a few weeks, I'll be in London, speaking at the itSMF-BCS Conference, and once again talking about Subversion 1.5. But this time it will be different. This time, I can talk about the release in the past tense!

For the intimate details of what this Subversion 1.5 brings, what upgrading means in terms of compatibility matters, and so on, I refer you to the official release notes. Also, my employer (CollabNet) has a handy-dandy collection of Subversion-1.5-related documentation, webinars, training session, and other material available.

Subversion 1.5 with merge tracking is released. ALL YOUR BASE[LINE] ARE BELONG TO US

Songs I wish I could sing

2008-06-17T07:41:00.004-04:00

But as for me, I will always have hope; I will praise you more and more.
My mouth will tell of your righteousness, of your salvation all day long, though I know not its measure.
I will come and proclaim your mighty acts, O Sovereign Lord; I will proclaim your righteousness, yours alone.
Since my youth, O God, you have taught me, and to this day I declare your marvelous deeds.
Even when I am old and gray, do not forsake me, O God, till I declare your power to the next generation, your might to all who are to come.
~ Psalms 71:14-18 (NIV)

"Programmer Insecurity"

2008-06-13T01:19:00.004-04:00

Ben Collins-Sussman seems to have found himself squarely in the middle of the "centralized vs. distributed version control" debate. It's not exactly what he intended to do, of course. Ben is just one of those folks who has years of experience in people-watching, and a keen ability to summarize the patterns he sees.

Ben's latest blog post (at the permalink-less URL http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=96) is more of that observational goodness. This time he tackles programmer insecurity. If you're a programmer, check it out — perhaps Ben is describing someone you know.

(Oh, and his post ventured into The Land of Version Control Tools, so if you wait a few days to read it, you'll almost certainly get bonus entertainment provided by a slew of comments aimed at furthering the which-kind-of-version-control-is-better debate.)

Final technical review of Version Control with Subversion, 2nd Edition

2008-06-10T23:02:00.003-04:00

Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian Fitzpatrick, and I — the primary authors of Version Control with Subversion — are nearing the end of the editing cycle for the second edition of that book. Last week, I put out a call for technical review assistance to the Subversion development community, which you can read at http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2008-06/0278.shtml.

Would you consider helping us out with this task? We can't promise you fame and fortune, but we'd be glad to list you in the acknowledgments section of the book!

It's All Part of The Plan

2008-06-06T09:24:00.004-04:00

Today's Bible reading had me in the book of 2 Kings, another in a series of relatively dry books describing the history of the Jews after they settled into the Promised Land. It's been a pretty depressing read as of late. Over twenty times in the books of 1 and 2 Kings alone does the Bible say that somebody — typically one of the kings of either Israel or Judah (yes, a nation split into two, as if the story wasn't enough of a downer) — "did evil in the eyes of the Lord". And usually, that phrase is followed with "… like his father". [Sidebar: Dads, if you think you've got even a remote chance of your kids not learning to behave from own example, you've got another think coming!]

So today I braced myself for more tales of war, deceit, betrayal, and some good old-fashioned doin' evil in the eyes of the Lord. And the reading didn't disappoint. 2 Kings 21 briefly describes Manasseh and Amon as two more of the evil kings.

But there was one bit in a previous chapter (chapter 19) that was actually hopeful; that actually made me read it twice over. In 2 Kings 19, the prophet Isaiah is comforting King Hezekiah (of Judah) with words from the Lord regarding the very real threat of an Assyrian takeover of Jerusalem. Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, had been pen pals as of late with Hezekiah, but was using his quill to hurl insults against God and his people. Hezekiah knows the score: Assyria has basically conquered every land they've stepped foot it, and without some divine intervention, Jerusalem would surely be just another statistic in the Assyrian conquest. And now Isaiah is presenting to Hezekiah God's response to Hezekiah's earnest prayers for help.

You can read the response for yourself in 2 Kings 19:20-31, but if I may, I'll summarize it here. The response goes something like this:

My dearest Sennacherib,

You ain't nothing.

Yeah, yeah, you talk all big. Got some military successes behind you, and you're getting a kick outta braggin' about all that. I get it. But &mdash oh? what's that? — oh, you didn't know? All that stuff you think you did back then?

That was all me.

You say you knocked over some strong cities? That was me. Oppressed some people? Me again.

It's all part of my plan, a plan I developed looooooong ago. And per my plan, you're time has come. Enough is enough. Lights out. Game over.

Sincerely, Almighty God

Within the time span of the next six verses, Assyria is struck by a plague that kills 185,000 people, and Sennacherib is murdered by his own sons.

God intervenes often in the stories of the Old Testament, but I appreciate how He reminds us now and again that He's ultimately in control of everything, even the stuff that looks at first glance like it's only happening to us because He's too busy to notice how we're getting dumped on.

Review: Buon Gusto Ristorante, South San Francisco, CA

2008-05-07T00:10:00.007-04:00

Tonight I had the opportunity to make my second visit to South San Francisco's Buon Gusto Ristorante (located at 224 Grand Avenue). My first visit was probably two years ago, and while I couldn't remember what I'd ordered that night, I did remember two things: I had thoroughly enjoyed the visit, and the complementary Marsala was wonderful. So, finding myself in the area on business with no better plans for the evening, I decided to see if a second visit could live up to the expectations of those memories.

Short answer: you betcha. I'm, like, a sub-amateur reviewer, so don't look for grandiose words here (other than, maybe, "grandiose" — but that's it, no more!). I just know what I like. And tonight, I liked everything.

I was greeted by the owner, who seems like just a classically pleasant man. And the various other staff with whom I interacted shared that quality, too. After being presented with the night's specials, I ordered a glass of the house Chianti, and one of those specials: a sautéed swordfish with a tomato-based and caper-ful sauce, with some spaghetti and vegetables on the side. I opted for salad instead of soup as the appetizer. The salad and wine were each served promptly, and while there was nothing particularly interesting about the salad, it was good. I actually had low expectations for a house wine, but was pleasantly surprised. The entrée arrived soon after I finished the salad, and was also really good.

When I'd wrapped up the main course, I was of course presented with dessert and coffee options. Now, I'm not a tiramisu guy. Actually — and my wife will testify to this — I abhor tiramisu. The idea of eating what typically amounts to cold, soggy, sponges of cookie-cakey-whateverness has repeatedly proven to be a bad one in my experience. But for whatever reason, tonight I clicked that mental "I'm Feeling Lucky" button and ordered the tiramisu (and a capaccino). You'll have to draw your own conclusions, though, because it was incredibly good (and I mean that quite literally). I don't know if it was good because it is what all other tiramisus aspire to be but aren't, or because perhaps it isn't really tiramisu at all and they pulled one over on me — the reasons matter so little to me after enjoying that delightful treat. And, luck of lucks, it came paired with another shot of complementary Marsala. Mmm...

So, plenty of really good food served by nice people in a pleasant atmosphere for $46.50 plus tip compelled me to post this review. As with all reviews, YMMV, but in this reviewer's opinion, it's gas money well spent.

Review: Avista Resort, North Myrtle Beach, SC

2008-05-05T21:05:00.001-04:00

I don't typically do reviews. They're so often tied to the reviewer's particular mood and expectations at the time of his or her singular experience with the establishment that, frankly, you need more than just a grain of salt when digesting them. But I'm going to step out of my comfort zone for a bit just to tell the Internet what I think about the Avista Resort in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

My family's first stay at the Avista Resort was, for all intents and purposes, the result of random selection. An Internet search for properties in the Myrtle Beach area returns, what, a thousand options? And you just know as you look at those professional photos of perfectly tanned beautiful people enjoying the facilities of Hotel Whatever that those photos were taken twelve years ago when that facility was actually in good shape. So, it was with some trepidation that we secured our first reservation at the Avista in March of 2007.

My family has now thrice visited the Avista Resort, most recently with a brief trip taken by just Amy and myself to celebrate ten wonderful years of marriage. The reality, in this instance, is that the Avista still is everything its website claims it is. This relatively new establishment still feels like a relatively new establishment. The rooms are clean, the lobbies and halls are clean — stuff is just in good shape. The staff seems to work hard at keeping it this way, too. On our last trip, there was some repainting in the hallways. This time, the parking garage was getting touch-ups. Always busy, always maintaining. And apparently the hotel guests aren't bearing too much of the cost burden of this maintenance — we've found the Avista rates to be very affordable.

We love the area in which the Avista is located too. Maybe it's just luck, but all three visits have been free of the sort of … unruliness of other areas of the Grand Strand. This despite our trips aligning with such festivities as "Biker Week" and "Society of Stranders Spring Week". You can walk to beach shops, restaurants, and nightlife spots. Or you can stay in and visit the hotel restaurant, Just Off Main, which offers a great breakfast buffet (none of this "continental breakfast" nonsense) and excellent lunch and dinner selections.

And the pools? My kids love the pools. Indoor and outdoor lazy rivers. Indoor and outdoor swimming pools. Indoor and outdoor hottubs. Weather is no obstacle here — you can't lose!

My only, only concern with the Avista has been the comfort of the beds. But as the email I received from the property manager today indicates, the resort is "currently updating the mattresses to pillow tops, so hopefully this will make [my] next stay more enjoyable."

When asked by TripAdvisor if I would recommend this resort to my best friend, I first ignored the fact that I married my best friend, then ignored the fact that I don't spend time categorizing the rest of my friends, but then finally answered the question with, "Absolutely yes".

Non-complementary relationships are a bad thing

2008-04-17T07:15:00.005-04:00

In contrast to the loving and supporting wife I described Samson's mother as, Samson himself didn't fair so well in love.

His first bride he chose from among the Philistines, a people group that was oppressing the Israelites at the time. She betrayed him shortly after their marriage, prompting him to go on a murdering spree. Her father, figuring Samson was too angry with her to forgive her, gave her away to "the friend who had attended [Samson] at his wedding" (Judges 14:20). This prompted Samson to go on an arson spree. Which prompted the Philistines, angry at Samson, to burn his wife and her father. Which prompted another murderous outrage from Samson. Sheesh.

After dallying with prostitutes, Samson meets the infamous Delilah. Delilah — working as an agent of the Philistine rulers — tries repeatedly to get Samson to reveal to her the secret of his great strength. And he repeatedly makes a fool of her by feeding her false answers to that question. But the Scriptures record that Delilah keeps pressing. I think Judges 16:15-16 pretty much sums up their whole relationship:

Then she said to him, "How can you say, 'I love you,' when you won't confide in me? This is the third time you have made a fool of me and haven't told me the secret of your great strength." With such nagging she prodded him day after day until he was tired to death.

Given the relationship his own parents had, how in the world did Samson manage to go so wrong when choosing partners?

Complementary relationships are no bad thing

2008-04-16T07:40:00.008-04:00

I found this bit from Judges 13:21-23 humorous today. The parents of the yet-unborn Samson are just realizing that lately they've been conversing with an angel of God.

When the angel of the Lord did not show himself again to Manoah and his wife, Manoah realized that it was the angel of the Lord. "We are doomed to die!" he said to his wife. "We have seen God!" But his wife answered, "If the Lord had meant to kill us, he would not have accepted a burnt offering and grain offering from our hands, nor shown us all these things or now told us this."

The Pilato translation into modern language:

The next time the angel of the Lord came to visit Manoah and his wife, Manoah recognized him as angelic and began to freak out. "Omigosh! It's all over for us -- we've seen God!" But his wife maintained her ability to be rational and calmly replied, "Chill out, Sweetheart. If God was going to zap us, he wouldn't have wasted so much time and energy on us."

Thank you, God, for spouses who can normalize our occasional bouts of irrationality.

Q4H: Was the Holocaust a punishment from God?

2008-03-26T08:54:00.005-04:00

Today's Bible reading covered Deuteronomy 28-30. It was a hard read, both in terms of the subject matter and the somewhat dry and repetitive writing style. It basically boils down to about 100 verses of God telling the nation of Israel through His servant, Moses, that if they are obedient, things will go well for them; if they aren't, life will be hell. The imagery is so intense, the warning from God so strong, and the foretold methods of discipline so harsh, that I found myself thinking about the Holocaust. Was the Holocaust -- in which millions and millions of Jews were tortured and killed -- a judgment from God of the sort that is foretold in these verses?

Israel's history is filled with repeated cycles of, as my pastor recently put it, "sin, suffering, supplication, and salvation." In and out of slavery, conquered by one nation after the other, the history of the Old Testament tells the tale of a nation that can't keep its eyes on its God, and an extremely jealous God who acts harshly against His chosen people not to "pay them back", but to "bring them back" to Him. But is the Holocaust too harsh even for God?

I Googled around a bit trying to find out what others thought about this question. One of the top hits was an article that claims if this was punishment, it's an unjust one that doesn't fit the crime (or perhaps any crime imaginable). It also points to things like the original Egyptian enslavement which doesn't appear to be a punishment for any particular thing, either. Sometimes, God just does what God does because He's God, and we can't possibly understand His purposes. The article wraps up with:

In our individual lives and in our view of history, we have a choice concerning how we wish to relate to G‑d. We can see Him as that Big Meany in the Sky and interpret accordingly. Or we can see a deep relationship happening between Man and G‑d — something we cannot always fathom, but believe in with unalterable faith. Torah gives you that freedom. In which world do you want to live?

My good friend Karl let me borrow a book some time ago entitled Who Wrote the Bible?, which (like many such scholarly books) points to multiple authors of the Pentateuch whose writings were later woven together and attributed to Moses. One of the most memorable things the author notes, though, is that if you separate the various contributing texts from one another, and read them individually, you no longer see this dichotomy in God's nature of being both compassionate and judgmental. One text will consistently describe the compassionate Abba Father God; another takes the "Big Meany in the Sky" approach. But clearly they all are talking about the very same God.

So I wonder, too, how much of what we attribute to God's nature comes exactly from what we want Him to be? How many Christians desperately need to believe in a loving God that won't zap them with lightning when they fail, thereby relaxing the standards they feel compelled to live up to? How many atheists desperately need to believe that the God of the Jews is cruel and unjust and therefore can't reasonably be God at all, thereby saving themselves the trouble of living up to His standards at all? Isn't the whole problem with our understanding of — and relationship with — God the fact that those things naturally have to occur on our terms and with our language, the weaker of the two communication protocols?

Ruling out the idea that the Holocaust was punishment because it was too extreme might work well for those who forget that God isn't required to adhere to our ideas of justice because He defines true justice. Insisting that all bad things happen as punishment for some shortcoming or sin works fantastically for those forget that God isn't required to adhere to our ideas of love because He is love. In the end, it seems we're all still left guessing, and trusting that the models of justice and love we have were given us because they reflect — as best as humanly possible — those facets of Almighty God.

The passage in Deuteronomy today leaves for me no doubt that these two vectors of God's nature should not be superficially limited by what fallen Man has to say about justice and love. To extents entirely unnatural, God fiercely judges:

You who were as numerous as the stars in the sky will be left but few in number, because you did not obey the Lord your God. Just as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess. Then the Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. … There the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life. In the morning you will say, "If only it were evening!" and in the evening, "If only it were morning!" — because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see.

...and God forgivingly loves:

When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come upon you and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back. He will bring you to the land that belonged to your fathers, and you will take possession of it. He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your fathers.

Love, rubies, and leaky faucets

2008-03-18T10:22:00.005-04:00

In Christian circles, you hear much about the "Proverbs 31 wife". Proverbs 31, the last chapter in that book, ends with a lengthy description of a "wife of noble character." The verse which begins this epilogue (Proverbs 31:10) sets the tone for and summarizes the twenty verses that follow:

A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies.

Now, my daily Bible reading schedule hasn't brought me to Proverbs 31 yet, so why does it appear that I'm skipping ahead? Because my reading has brought me through the first twenty-seven chapters of Proverbs, where we learn much in tightly packaged little metaphors about the wrong kind of wife.

After coming across the term "quarrelsome wife" for what felt like the hundredth time today, I wanted to review all such references I'd hit so far. As it turns out, there really aren't that many of them, but this brief collection is enough to get the point across:

A wife of noble character is her husband's crown, but a disgraceful wife is like decay in his bones. (Proverbs 12:4)

A foolish son is his father's ruin, and a quarrelsome wife is like a constant dripping. (Proverbs 19:13)

Better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a quarrelsome wife. (Proverbs 21:9, and again in Proverbs 25:24)

Better to live in a desert than with a quarrelsome and ill-tempered wife. (Proverbs 21:19)

A quarrelsome wife is like a constant dripping on a rainy day; restraining her is like restraining the wind or grasping oil with the hand. (Proverbs 27:15-16)

Now, these verses will probably send feminists into a tizzy. But I post them here not because they sound like the type of grumbling that husbands do about their wives over beer and pizza (albeit, a little less eloquently). I post them here because I'm thankful for the wife God gave me, and just want to encourage other husbands to love their wives. Just love your wives. Check your love against one famous description of true love found in 1 Corinthians 13 — does it pass muster? Are you loving at full capacity?

I'm guilty of not loving my wife Amy at full capacity all the time. Sometimes I'm not patient, kind, unselfish, and so on; that's something I need to work on. Thankfully, after nearly ten years of marriage (April 25 will mark our first decade as husband and wife), Amy is still all of those things. She's a Proverbs 31 wife, and gracious enough to be mine. The only "constant dripping" I have to suffer through comes from the toilet tank in our master bathroom.

Subversion talk at Charlotte.PM this Wednesday

2008-02-25T10:29:00.005-05:00

If you're in the Charlotte area and interested in an overview of Subversion plus the highlights of the upcoming 1.5 release thereof, consider attending the Charlotte Perl Mongers technical meeting this Wednesday, February 27th at 7pm in room IT4134 at CPCC, where I'll be giving just such a talk. And if time permits, we'll also get a demo of svk, another version control system build atop Subversion's core libraries — bonus! See the official meeting notice for details.

Q4H: How random is random?

2008-02-16T08:46:00.005-05:00

The "little bit o' Proverbs" segment of today's reading covered Proverbs 16:22-33. Now, verse 33 in my Bible is squeezed into the top of a column, immediately above a drop-cap-style "17" (the next chapter). I almost didn't see it there, but I'm glad I did. The verse reads:

The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.

This was interesting to me because it seems to overlap so many things I've read about just in this past week or so.

In Sunday School, we've been looking at Jonah. Most folks know at least the rough details of Jonah's story. But I recalled one detail revealed in Jonah 1:7. Jonah is on a ship, running away from God's command for him to preach in Nineveh, and a violent storm comes up. The sailors are all freaking out, and — in truly superstitious fashion — decide to cast lots to see which person on board is to blame. Guess where the lots fall? To Jonah. What are the odds? The boat was big enough to have a deck that you could go below (because Jonah did) — how many hands were required to operate such a vessel?

Discussions around another topic with Amy have had us reading in the book of Acts as of late. There (in Acts 1:21-26), the eleven disciples (the original twelve minus Judas the Betrayer) decide to cast lots to see who would replace Judas in the lineup. The odds here are less interesting — there were only two contenders. (A dude named Matthias won.) Of interest to me was that until today, I had always thought, "What a stupid way to choose a ministry partner!" But if the Lord controls the lots, maybe it's not so stupid after all.

Finally, I read much about the debate between Evolution and Intelligent Design theorists. Evolutionists essentially believe that all that is today is the result of random mutations of cells and sub-cell bits, plus this idea of natural selection (where the mutations that prove beneficial get to stick around through future generations, and those that don't … don't). Pure IDers don't necessarily have any beef with those processes, but also don't believe that they are alone enough to explain the vast degrees of change over the assumed period of time that the Evolutionists claim. IDers believe there is an intelligent agent in the mix somewhere, perhaps guiding the selection process or somesuch. But if random isn't truly random (as our verse in Proverbs could imply), maybe the selection really is natural, and the it's the mutations that carry the intelligence.

Unfortunately, if we extrapolate this fully, things start to feel wrong. Is gambling okay because God controls the outcome? (Or is it only okay if you're winning, because God is blessing you?) Should we flip coins to find marriage partners? Roll dice to decide whether to attend or skip school today?

Certainly we aren't called to demonstrate a lack of discernment. Take the decision about the new twelfth disciple, for example. Among the thousands of Christ-followers to choose from, only two were proposed. A great deal of filtering had occurred before the lots were cast. Both men were equally suited for the job, and the coin-toss approach was as good as any a way to pick one without hurting the other's feelings. Also, the Bible does reveal moral absolutes — you can be sure that if chance, luck, Fate, or whatever drives you is driving you against those grains, it ain't God casting the lots.

Use your head, and don't leave the game of life up to mere chance and guesswork. Unless, of course, you work for Hasbro.

Q4H: Unrestricted prayer power?

2008-01-26T07:49:00.001-05:00

My wife Amy and I have had some interesting discussions as of late regarding certain beliefs held by some friends of ours about some of the more supernatural aspects of Christianity. I'll not go into all those things in this post, but one axiom, if you will, of those beliefs leaves me with some questions. The axiom is simply this: if you ask anything in Jesus' name, believing that you'll receive it, you'll get it. That's all there is to it.

The reading schedule that I and others are using to read through the Bible in its entirety this year employs the following pattern: weekdays take us sequentially through the Old Testament (minus Psalms) and with a sprinkle of Proverbs; Saturdays through the New Testament (with more Proverbs); and Sunday through Psalms. So today's reading had us in Matthew, and coincidentally covered two different instances of Jesus stating this very axiom. In Matthew 18:19-20, he says, "Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three come together in my name, there I am with them." And then later in Matthew 21:22, Jesus tells his disciples (who are wondering how it was that he was able to cause a fig tree to instantly wither), "If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer." Presumably, it is on these promises that many stand when they seek to perform Jesus-like signs and wonders (faith healing, exorcism, etc.). And why not? As written, those are some serious promises! But as presented by our gospel authors, are they, in fact, complete and true? Shouldn't there be a clause in there that limits the promise to only those things that align with God's will? For some folks, no.

I recall a conversation I had about this with one of our friends who claimed this promise as-is without the "will of God" qualifier. And many folks do, believing that they can actually bend the will of God through prayer. I'm skeptical about such a seemingly wide open promise, though, and my skepticism actually began to turn into a bit of anger. I was compelled to ask why, if so many people believed exactly as she did — that anything asked for in Jesus' name would be granted to those that believe — no one had stepped up to organize a group prayer to end hunger and famine and war worldwide once and for all time. I mean, shame on anyone who lays claim to power of that magnitude and fails to use it to do good! Unfortunately I can't remember her response now. Perhaps her "out" was that the askers don't meet the faith requirement of the promise — that they don't really think these worldwide problems can end.

This actually runs right alongside some of the statements made recently by Michael Shermer — the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine — who was curious about the apparent limitations of miracles. In a recent debate with Dinesh D'Souza, and referring to soldiers returning from war today missing arms and legs, he asks (as you can see at about 5 minutes into this video clip), "Why does nobody pray for them to grow a new limb? Why can't God grow a new limb? A salamander can do it! Surely the creator of the universe can do it."

Again, maybe we just lack the faith to get it done. Or maybe God has decided that these days He'd prefer to do only the second class of miracles described by Dinesh later in the debate — using natural means, but driving them in ways they wouldn't naturally go themselves, to accomplish the supernatural. Or, given the staggering improbability that all the physical laws and forces and constants and such would turn out just right to support our Universe and our life in it, perhaps everything we know is just one giant miracle. Maybe those who need "to see it to believe it" are just out of luck, as the seeing requires belief.

Or maybe my friend has tunnel-vision, and is ignoring other Scriptures which indicate that there is a must-comply-with-God's-will clause. We read in I John 5:14-15 that "if we ask anything according to [God's] will, He hears us." The Lord's Prayer (or Model Prayer) even demonstrates humility to God's will with the phrase "[God's] will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10). Finally, we can examine Jesus' own prayer life. Could there be a more faith-filled, more believing, more humble, more likely-to-bend-God's-will person than Jesus Christ? And yet what was his prayer in his time of greatest need? Luke 22:42 records Jesus as praying just prior to his arrest and crucifixion, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done."

Q4H: Didn't Esau's mama tell him there'd be girls like that?

2008-01-11T11:57:00.001-05:00

The Bible is so full of interesting little nuggets. Today's reading took me through Genesis 26:34-35, where we see only the very tip of what is surely a fascinating story.

When Esau was forty years old, he married Judith daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and also Basemath daughter of Elon the Hittite. They were a source of grief to Isaac and Rebekah.

A "source a grief" to the in-laws? Sounds like the beginnings of a television sitcom! This seems to be Judith's only appearance in the Bible; Basemath gets named elsewhere only in genealogy listings. Wouldn't you just love to know the rest of that story? I sure would. Why didn't Esau do the arranged marriage thing? It seemed to work out pretty well for his dad.

I don't know why I'm interested in this. Maybe it's because the situation is so foreign to me: my parents adore my wife, perhaps more so even than they adore me!

Q4H: Why all the confusion?

2008-01-04T14:43:00.001-05:00

I've long been taught that way back in the day, a bunch of folks — who, at the time, all spoke the same language — got together at a place called Babel and decided to build themselves a huge tower that would reach to Heaven to show off how great they were. As the story goes, God is disgusted by this display of arrogance, and decides to frustrate their efforts by causing them all to speak different languages. Unable to effectively communicate, their building project fails and the people scatter.

Today's reading covered the section of the Bible that tells this tale (Genesis 11:1-9), but the details don't match the story told to me as a child. Yes, we have people trying to build a huge tower (using an apparently novel brick-making technique instead of stone-hewing, the text tells us). But the target altitude of this thing appears only to be "the heavens", not Heaven proper. The goal is a selfish one, but appears to be mere self-preservation instead of something sinister such as exalting oneself above God. But most importantly, the text never says that God's actions were intended as punishment for man's impure motives; it reads as though God simply didn't like the fact that man, absent communication barriers, was destined for success in all that he put his mind to.

Why cause the confusion? Man is certainly no threat to God, His will, or His work.

I have a theory, though admittedly one that I'm forming as I type this (and is probably a bit "out there"). We read early in Genesis that man is created vegetarian (Genesis 1:29). After Adam and Eve sin in the Garden, God curses them. Part of Adam's curse is that his farming job will no longer be easy (Genesis 3:17-18). Man must now depend on God, as the Designer and Ruler of Nature, to permit harvests. In fact, there are no shortage of cultures in times past and present that believed exactly this — that the gods must be begged for sufficiently productive harvests so that societies and civilizations don't die of starvation.

Anyway, we move on in history to Noah and the famous flood. After the flood waters recede, Noah and his family are tasked with repopulating the earth. But there's a dietary change here — in Genesis 9:3 God tells Noah he gets to eat meat. (Yes, I say "gets to" — you'll find no vegetarian sympathies here, folks!) But what, then, does this mean for Adam's curse? The primary physical payload of the curse on Man is that the earth will no longer give up her fruits readily for us to eat. However, post-Noah man is given another food source to draw from anyway. Maybe, just maybe, God — having recognized that His goal with the original curse (to draw Man to a dependence on Himself) is being undermined by this meat-eating loophole — acts in what seems like a spiteful manner at Babel to amend the original curse and draw Man back into dependence.

Now that's how rumors — and entirely new false religions — get started.

Q4H: Does the Tree of Life still exist?

2008-01-01T11:33:00.001-05:00

I'm going to try to read the Bible through this year, following the reading schedule published by a local radio station (New Life 91.9 WRCM). If the whole year goes like my first day did, I'm going to have a whooooole bunch of outstanding "questions for heaven" (Q4H). Some of them I'll toss up here for armchair Bible scholars to weigh in on. What follows is my first question.

In Genesis 1:8-9, God builds Himself a garden in Eden, and plants two trees in it: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (which bore one of the most famous fruits of all time), and the tree of life. Implied in Genesis 3:22-24, after the fall of man, is the fact that had Adam and Eve been able to outrun God to the tree of life and partake of its fruit, they would have gained immortality (though, presumably it would have been a life of eternal shame). Well, I suppose the reading also supports the alternative idea that perhaps the tree of life's fruit gave life for some period of time, renewable by further consumption — that's not really a key piece of my question, though.

My question is simple — does the tree of life still grow somewhere in the Middle East today? Do angels still guard the entrance to this garden?

"If I only had..."

2007-12-25T22:33:00.000-05:00

My dear wife, Amy, loves board and card games. To her, "game time" is the sixth love language, and her primary one.

Last night she and I were playing a few rounds of In a Pickle, a game in which she typically tends to beat me. This was, however, just not her night. I was leading the game seven sets to none. After playing another card toward our eighth set, she drew from the deck (which contains all cards on which there is written a single noun, if you don't know the game). Glancing at the new noun in her hand, she suddenly exclaimed, "Yes! I have a brain! There's so much I can do with a brain!"

Her new body part served her well, but in the end, victory was mine.

Hacking on the LG CU400

2007-12-21T02:54:00.000-05:00

I recently bought (via eBay) a USB data cable for my LG CU400 cellphone. Sadly, I did so before realizing that LG apparently doesn't provide software besides basic Windows drivers for this phone. (For those interested, I used the drivers from a package named LGUSBModemDriver_Eng_Ver_4.5.exe, found with a Google site search.) At any rate, my investment thus far (which was only about $7, truth be told) was looking like a poor one.

But tonight I tried BitPim even though my phone model is not listed as explicitly supported. To my great surprise, BitPim recognized my phone as an "Other CDMA phone". That meant I got filesystem-explorer-type access, but none of the other GUI goodies. That's okay, though -- it only took a little bit of poking around to figure out where the phone keeps my photos, videos, mp3s, and so on.

And best of all, I was able to pull off the hack described here. So now I can use the mobile versions of Google Maps and Gmail on my phone without answering a network usage permission prompt for what seemed before like every packet transmitted!

12/21/2007 Followup: I forgot to note that I was doing all this on a Windows 2000 machine. But I'm pretty sure the drivers I got were rated for Windows XP, too. No clue about Vista support for any of this stuff.

Irony combo, super-sized, to go

2007-12-11T10:13:00.000-05:00

Dinner time — or, the hour just before dinner time — has for a long time been a period of heightened stress in my household. Every day Amy tentatively approaches me while I'm working to ask, "What do you want to do for dinner?" Every day I dread her coming.

It's not that I don't love to have my Sweetheart visit me. It's just that I almost never have a well-formed opinion about dinner. Do we cook or do we hit a restaurant? If we cook, what do we make? If we dine out, where do we go? In Amy's defense, it's the sort of decision I'm prone to micromanage anyway, so why not ask me? In mine ... well, I don't really have a defense. And so every day she comes, and every day I herald her arrival with a jovial, "Uh-oh, here comes the what-do-you-want-for-dinner question!" And so we sit. And think. And talk about what else needs to be accomplished that evening. And, on a good day, we have a decision made within an hour's time.

Last week, however, this daily exercise finally wore it out its welcome. In truth, I don't care what or where we eat. I'd prefer to eat more meals at home and stop hemorrhaging cash towards goods that only last as long our digestive tracts retain them. I'd prefer to eat earlier than later so that our kids aren't going straight to bed after eating. But most of all, I'd prefer not to be asked about dinner at all. So I told my dear wife these things. I dubbed her the Queen of the Kitchen, and said we would do for dinner whatever she wanted us to do. She knows my preferences, she knows her preferences, she knows what our boys do and don't like to eat, and she knows what's on our calendar and TODO list better than anyone else. It just makes sense for her to take full responsibility of dinner planning.

Wonderful woman that she is, I still have a place to live after this conversation. In fact, she seems to have embraced the responsibility. She quickly planned about a week's worth of meals, bought the ingredients, and we've already had two wonderful dinners in which I played no culinary role. The arrangement doesn't leave me without responsibility, of course — my job is to keep Gavin and Aidan out of the kitchen while she works. And frankly, I need to be investing a little more time with them, anyway. It's a win-win!

Or, it was a win-win. On Sunday afternoon, our oven died.

Ups and Downs

2007-09-30T21:40:00.001-04:00

They say life is full of ups and downs. But who, exactly, are "they"? And why are they stalking me?

Gavin and I shared the neat experience yesterday afternoon of taking the training wheels off his bike. He's been adamantly opposed to this idea since Christmas, when he first got his bike, insisting that he'd go two-wheelin' "when he was as big as Daddy" — and not a moment sooner! Well, yesterday I just went ahead and took them off, which he protested until I calmly informed him that it's just a couple of nuts, and we could put the training wheels back on later if necessary. With that, he braved up and let me hold the seat of his bike while he pedaled around the back yard. He had a blast. And I had — still have — a muscle cramp in my backside as a result. He was so proud of himself, and we were so proud of him. Sure, he fell a few times (and one fall was particularly exciting because it forced me to dive-roll over him and his bike). But it certainly wasn't the falls he was telling his Nana and Paw-paw about today at church. It was the ride.

Ups and downs.

While Gavin biked, Aidan was hitting pitched whiffle balls, and loving it. He's been a confident tricycler for a few weeks now, and for the moment we're quite alright with keeping him a mere foot off the ground instead of the two feet a bike would require. Unfortunately, all he's thinking about at the moment is the nasty bit of road rash he's sporting on his left knee after a sidewalk slide heading into church tonight. He's a pitiful sight, what with his tear-streaked face and constant reminders to "don't touch it".

Ups and downs.

Speaking of church, what a roller coaster of emotions that is. Our church is full of good people with good hearts, but ultimately is still made up of people, every one of us just as flawed as the next one. The church body has been gracious enough to put me a position of some influence regarding the music, and I've been so fortunate to be able to affect some change in our church in small ways — playing guitar for the Praise Team, spinning more contemporary music before the service, yet keeping the old hymns of the faith ever-present in the lineup, too. But this stuff always meets with a gaggle of supporters and detractors. It's weird to come away from a service like today's where multiple folks are saying how much the music ministered to them that day, only to hear later indirectly that so-and-so said that CD we played before the service (Shane and Shane's Clean) was "just awful".

Ups and downs.

But the ups and downs aren't always in the present and past. We can look forward to them in the future, too. Looking forward to the ups is, of course, quite easy. We've got a North Myrtle Beach trip coming up soon, Plaza's Homecoming (with Geoffrey Janes as a guest speaker, and Josh and Tasha Via joining us for the musical stuff) is in two weeks, and immediate after the Homecoming dinner-on-the-grounds, I get to hop on a plane and go to Germany to speak at a Subversion Conference. Fun, exciting, stuff worth looking forward to.

But what about the downs? What's to look forward to there? Opportunities. Opportunities to learn more about myself and God's purpose for me here on Earth. To see how, when the bum stuff comes, there's always hope on the other side of it. To see if I can pass the pre-test (a given trial) put before me, and then afterwards pass the real test (giving glory to God for allowing me to survive that trial). And if that fails, we can celebrate the downs simply because they help to make the ups so much sweeter.

Make Me a Witness

2007-08-21T13:29:00.001-04:00

I've been in a bit of a songwriting slump for a while. Like, most of my life, if I'm honest about it. But I'm leading the Praise & Worship team at my church these days, though, so at least I'm musically active.

The other day I was trying to decide which tunes the P&W team should lead at the following Sunday's worship service, when suddenly a whole different line of thought entered my head. My church is located in a really arts-focused area of Charlotte. The demographics here are a weird mix — like someone pouring a pitcher of young-hip-and-liberal-minded into a jug of impoverished-minority-down-and-out. Physically, socially, emotionally, educationally and financially, this is like mixing oil and water. But spiritually, they all — we all — need the same thing. That fact, as well as my own struggle with being a useful catalyst for spiritual change in others, resulted an hour or so later in the following:

Make Me a Witness
by: C. Michael Pilato

At a sidewalk cafe sits a modern-day, American man. / A triumph of evolution going nowhere as fast as he can. / Now there's surely a place, to lay out a case of my own. / Could it be right here between iced cappuccino and scones? / Who is my brother? Is he just the one like me? / Who is my neighbor? Are they just the ones I see? / And is the last chance they'll have to meet Jesus?

God grant them all a place in my heart / Next to Your Spirit, there in the deepest part. / Make me a witness, a model of Jesus, / And teach me to point this world to You.

There's a girl on the corner, a stone's throw away from our pews. / She knows of a Saviour, but He's of no practical use. / And like Mary of long ago, she's bound by an evil inside. / But oh, Magdalena, would your story bring hope to this child? / Who is my sister? Is she just the one like me? / Who is my neighbor? Are they just the ones I see? / And is the last chance they'll have to meet Jesus?

Somebody's wishing that they could have peace, love, and joy in their soul. / Somebody listen, 'cause I don't know when I'll be feeling so bold.

God grant them all a place in my heart / You know their value, you've made them a work of art. / Drive me to witness, to model my Jesus, / And teach me to point this world to You.

Version Control Provides Medical Breakthrough?

2007-07-24T09:44:00.000-04:00

For years, the developers of the Subversion open-source version control system (of which I am one) have been touting Subversion as "a compelling replacement for CVS". All this time, I thought we were talking about the Concurrent Versions System. But a recent Google search for "cvs logo" provided this link. I guess you can file that under unfortunately identical acronyms.

Happy 3rd birthday, Subversion

2007-02-24T02:16:00.001-05:00

Three years ago, on February 23, 2004, the Subversion developers released version 1.0 of their new-at-the-time version control system. Quite unlike human offspring (if you can pardon the anthropomorphism in which I'm about to engage), Subversion hit the proverbial ground running. Not only could it walk and talk just as well as its much older cousin, CVS—in many cases, it could do so better. It remembered the finer details of things better, which is pretty important as a version control system exists for no reason at all if not to remember things. With support for directory versioning, atomic commits, binary differencing, offline operations, and user-defined versioned metadata, and with a modular design built from the start with WAN-readiness in mind, Subversion was by no means the squirming, near-sighted, helpless offspring that, say, my two sons were at birth.

Back then, folks were telling us to release 1.0 even earlier than we did. But the Subversion development community consists of incredibly bright and friendly hackers dedicated to excellence. We had a clear picture of what Subversion 1.0 was to be—basically, a compelling replacement for CVS—and we had well-formed ideas of what that meant in terms of features and stability.

In the three years since the 1.0 release of Subversion, there have been another four large release milestones. With Subversion 1.4.3 as the most recent release, and Subversion 1.5 currently under development, it's clear that there is a vision for the software that exceeds just making a better CVS. Constant attention has been given to ways of expanding the feature set, expanding the interoperability with other systems, and expanding the user base by demonstrating version control done right.

Subversion's adoption rate and availability on high-volume project hosting service websites are testimonies of its maturity level and affirmations of its viability as a contender in the version control arena. Today, you can use Subversion to hold your software project's precious source code at Tigris.org, SourceForge.net, Google's project hosting service, and no small number of other hosting sites. Where solid statistics exist for such things, it's clear that the number of Subversion installations continues to grow at a better-than-constant rate. And industry analysts and journalists agree—Subversion is an exception to the trend of failed open-source software projects.

So, having been fortunate enough to be associated with this software for just over six years now, I say "Happy Birthday" to Subversion and its development community. We'll close our eyes and collectively blow out the candles; it's the users whose wishes come true.