The home inspection went well. It turned up 2 fogged windows and one non-functional power outlet. We have no clue yet if the seller will be willing to fix them or not. I have a little bit of trouble being overly concerned about either. There is also a large pane of glass for the sliding door to be replaced, but the seller told us about that, and listed it as an “as is” item. Still, that leaks air into the unheated but contained sun room, so the overall heat loss should be diminished to the point that it is only “important” to get it fixed and not “critical.”

Lauren and I filled out what seemed like a ream of forms for the loan application. I need to find out what, exactly, is the next step. What else, between now and closing, do I have to schedule and/or be there for, versus what just sort of happens automatically as a result of the balls we have now set in motion? It is this sort of question that makes me very glad that we chose to have a real estate agent, and also that we know Andy to guide us through the loan side of things. I doubt the seller’s agent would be anywhere near so responsive and helpful.

The study¹ findings were released in book form, not in a journal. I suspect that means that its findings are useless and meaningless. Still, a pair of real researchers, working for institutions of higher learning (a college and a university respectively), found a 67% success rate in changing sexual orientation through a program of “group discussions, counseling, journal writing, Scripture reading and prayer.”²

However, since it is not in a peer reviewed journal, their effort is wasted, their study might as well not exist.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” – W. B. Yeats¹

Periodically I get challenged on my repeated assertion that Evolution, to the (limited) extent it can be called a single theory, is inherently opposed to theism. Mr. Casey Luskin is here today to back me up on this one, having taken the time to summarize some recent examples of this.¹ Such statements as these lend credence to my assertion that evolution is not, in fact, a scientific theory at all, but is rather a philosophical one. His examples come from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature, Cell Cycle, Microbe Magazine, and Gene. They also come from a variety of authors.

This listing of examples is short, and is by no means definitive proof. Still, it does lend at least some credence.

Yesterday the air conditioning service guy recharged the freon in the air handler here at the office. Today for the first time in MONTHS, it is cold here at the office. At least upstairs. There is a nine degree difference between up here and down by the thermostat (colder up here) and another nine degree difference when you go into the server room.

Once Lauren is able to print off the contract and initial it as needed, we will have a ratified contract on a condo. I am at once very excited and very nervous. This is far and away the biggest purchase I/we have ever made.

God works in mysterious ways. If either of the first two sellers had accepted any of the offers/counter offers we submitted to them, we would have ended up paying nearly the same amount for smaller places, and in the case of the short-sale place, one that needed more work.

Next step is the home inspection. Hopefully that will go well.

“In our culture, it’s become accepted that men, by their nature, are brutes, jerks or buffoons, while women, by theirs, are loyal, smart and admirable. Men, bad. Women, good. That’s the underlying worldview of the majority of the entertainment, education and even public policy (laws) that surround us. ” – Ms. Candice Watters¹

In the days immediately preceding the 2.2.0 release, I called for some time to be spent looking at the growing backlog of bugs and enhancement requests that has accumulated in trac since we went public with pidgin and finch. Sean in particular responded beyond my hopes, closing more than 100 tickets in just a few days!!

In related news, Ethan, with the help of one of the trac developers, managed to nail the source of our continual problems with trac. By eliminating the drop down that listed the people to whom a ticket could be assigned, he radically reduced the performance hit we take by running trac on our server. The load average has dropped from 10+ to 3-5, and the CPU utilization is down in the 20-40% range instead of the 100-110% range (possible only because we are a vmware guest I suspect, how else could you use 110% of your processor?).

Overall, we are responding faster to more issues since we left SF’s trackers for trac, while still maintaining a relatively fast development cycle. In the months to come, hopefully we will nail an even greater chunk of the incoming tickets, and come up with a better way for translators to interact with the project.

Despite this though, we are continually being told that we are unresponsive to our users, and insulted for our decisions. Only this morning, for example, we were told that 90% of users think that every change we have made since the first 2.0.0 beta is a step backwards. When the user failed to come up with anything other than vague insults and obvious red-herrings in more than 10 minutes, we removed him from the channel. This is regrettable, not that we removed him, but that it was necessary. We try very hard to listen to everyone who approaches us with comments and criticism of our work. While we cannot take all the advice we receive, it is physically impossible, and in fact do not take much of it, we have reversed unpopular decisions and/or worked with various segments of the user base to come up with some compromise.

Still, I honestly think that (almost) no one really cares about the exact graphic used for the available state. For years I have seen people asking about replacing this graphic or that graphic, or even all of them. Such people have been genuinely concerned that the specific graphic used for this or that was poorly chosen. The complaints about the green circle do not (with a few rare exceptions) match that pattern. Rather, people complain about the graphic being “huge” even though it is the same size as the protocol icon it replaced. Alternatively, they complain about it being ugly, but want to replace it not with a different icon representing available, but with an option to use it as an emblem over the protocol icon instead. If the icon itself, and not the removal of the protocol icons, was the problem, then returning the protocol icons and returning status to an emblem would not be the solution. Similarly, the icon is clearly only “huge” in relation to the very small emblems that previously denoted state.

That being said, it will be interesting to see if the complaints change in light of the new option to see protocol icons merged in for 2.2.0. I suspect that they will not, though hopefully the (relatively) few users who tried to remain rational in the firestorm debates that have come up since 2.0.0, will be pleased.

I spent some time with the wp-randomquotes plugin today. I noticed a few months ago that it was not displaying every quote in the database, and this has been increasingly annoying me.

It took me longer than it should have to track down what was up. The problem was that when I delete a quote (which I have done a few times, because there have been times I have entered in one poorly), it does not backfill the quote ID number. So my quote database goes 1 4 … 17 18 20 … 102. The plugin, when it goes to display all quotes, does an sql query to get all quotes into a single array, which it then counts. Naturally enough, as you can infer from the above, it finds 99 quotes. It then iterates from 0 to 100, attempting to find a quote for each $i. If there is no quote at a given $i (such as $i=2), it skips it. It gets quote 100 because it increments $i after the test but before it tries to pull the quote. But it misses quotes 101 and 102 because $i is now larger than 99.

The solution is to have two iterators, both of which start at 0. Iterate $i from 0 to 99, when you reach $j = 99, stop. Inside that while loop, there was already a test for an empty quote, have that increment $j instead of $i. Then make sure you increment $j after a successful query after displaying the relevant quote. If you increment it too early, you’ll skip the quote you just found. If you fail to increment it, you will find the same quote repeatedly. This way $j will grow faster for $i, with the difference between them at any given time being equal to the number of deleted quotes that have been reached at that point of the process. So that when $i = 99, $j = 102. Then all the quotes display.

Archbishop Wuerl has proposed making eight of the twelve inner city schools in his diocese into charter schools to save them from closing down completely.¹ This would entail changing the names of the schools and removing religion from the curriculum. Once upon a time, a parish would offer free or nearly free tuition, running the school on general parish funds, and making ends meet because nuns, sisters, brothers and deacons do not make as much as lay staff. As lay teachers and administration replaced the religious, the operating expenses rose. Many parishes could no longer afford to pay for all of the school’s expenses, and started charging and raising tuition. Apparently the archdiocese of Washington D.C still heavily subsidizes the students’ tuition, but with free charter schools, parents are pulling their children from the Catholic schools to save money.

This is entirely understandable, parents have so many struggles and sacrifices on their plates as they try to raise their children. This is especially true of our inner city poor. That is why I am not as upset about this proposal as I could be. If the choice is between closing the schools and secularizing them, then by all means secularize them. The students will get a lesser education, but hopefully still better than that in the public schools available to them. Still, I hope this is not a result of the diocese expecting the schools to support themselves. That is an all too common perspective (it seems to me) for a pastor to have, and one that I believe is at best suboptimal if not outright wrong.