bamed.org

So we’re starting a series going through Judges at church. The following video was shown Sunday morning to encourage people to read through Judges on their own.

After reading this, I suddenly feel the need to step away from the keyboard and take a walk!!

If you follow my feed, you may notice some uncharacteristic posts on it.  Those belong to my wife’s blog.  I was hosting her blog, and mine on my server at home.  I switched hosts on my blog, but left hers on my server.  Well, I took my site out of httpd.conf which left her’s as the default.  Since DNS is still propagating, FeedBurner checked the old IP and since my wife’s blog was the default site, it pulled from her blog.

So please disregard anything that seems different from the geeky stuff that you normally find here.

Thanks!

So… what’s going on this week?

Tomorrow my sister moves to Russia.

Today and tomorrow we are having a staff retreat.  Two full days of meetings.  There’s a lot of changes coming up after the new worship center is finished, so there’s a lot to discuss.  I had trouble getting on the wi-fi the first part of today’s meetings because I got the wrong WEP key.  I thought I’d try to crack it.  A 64-bit WEP key should be pretty simple, I did have my orinoco card and a copy of backtrack with me, so it shouldn’t have been difficult, but I was a bit too distracted with the meeting.  So I just asked for the key again and realized I had typed an “e” when he said “d”.

Thursday we’re having a staff outing.  We’re going canoing. Of course we’re in the middle of a heat advisory, so it should be fun.

A while back our washing machine broke.  I’ve tried to fix it but didn’t have any luck, so tonight we got another one.  I was taking the old one out, unhooking the hose from the cold water to the washer, when the facet the hose was attached to came off.  The pipe broke about an inch and a half under the facet.  So water starts gushing in my face and I start panicking.  After a few frantic minutes I get the water main turned off and we get a hold of our landlords who send out their repair guy and we get it all fixed.  So then I hook up the new washer and we no longer have to make any trips to the laundromat.

My sister who has been living in North Africa for the past year came to town last night.  She’ll be here about a month before she returns.  It was good to see her again.  We didn’t get to visit long, but I’m sure I’ll see more of her this next month.  The kids were really excited to see her.  We pulled up Google Maps and she showed us where her apartment is, and where the language school she’s been going to is.

My other sister appears to have her visa issue settled.   So that means she should be leaving for Russia August 15th.

So that means I’ll be the last one left in Joplin.

My little sister is moving to Russia soon.  She’s going as an English teacher and will be joining a team of missionaries our church supports.  In order to get her visa she had to submit a letter of invitation from the school she will be teaching at.  She got the letter and submitted all the necessary paperwork this week.  Then she got notice from the Russian Embassy that she didn’t submit a letter of invitation, which she did, but apparently the letter the school sent her didn’t have the necessary information on it.  So she contacted the school and asked them to fax it to the Russian Embassy.  She leaves August 15th, which is about 18 business days away.  It take 10 business days for the Russian embassy to process all the necessary paperwork, and another 2-3 days for the visa to return (with her passport she had to send with the paperwork) in the mail.  So far she hasn’t heard back from the school, so at this point she’s just sitting and waiting.   Could you spend some time praying about this today?  I know she’s learning to trust, but you can’t help just getting a bit nervous about all this.

I’ve setup phpDiplomacy at http://www.geeks-4-jesus.org/diplomacy. It’s a php implementation of the board game Diplomacy which is somewhat similar to Risk.

If you’re interested in joining a game go to http://www.geeks-4-jesus.org/diplomacy and register.

Last week I tried something I’ve been wanting to try for a long time. I ordered an old Ipaq 3650 on Ebay and installed Linux on it. In order to install Linux you need either a serial cable (usb won’t work) or a compact flash sleeve. I just happened to have a CF sleeve from an old Ipaq I used to have. So I went to http://www.handhelds.org, the home of the handheld Linux projects and found the instructions there that I needed. I should note that it looks like this project is dying. There haven’t been any updates for almost a year on Opie (one of the environments available), and the other options hadn’t seen any activity for several years.

So I copied the necessary files to my CF card, ran “Bootloader.exe” which replaced the Ipaq’s bootloader, then I was able to install the Opie image from my CF card. It rebooted and everything worked. I really liked the interface, but everything wasn’t as great as I’d hoped. First of all the 3650 comes with a 16M ROM plus 16MB of RAM. WinCE uses the RAM to store files and data on (which you lose on a reboot) making it appear you have 32MB of memory available. Using RAM as ROM has some obvious drawbacks, so Linux won’t do it, which means I only had 16MB of storage, and the Opie image was over 15MB. So I started out with less than 1MB of memory available. Luckily I have a 512MB CF card. So I started uninstalling software from the system ROM and moving it over to the CF card. The problem with that was the CF card was formatted using vFat. When software was installed to the CF, it would recreate the file structure of the root file system(/), then create symlinks. For example, when installing samba it created a directory /media/cf/etc/samba then create a symlink between that directory and /etc/samba. The problem with that is that the OS didn’t support creating symlinks on a vFat partition. So I created a loopback partition on the CF card. A loopback partition is a file on the CF card that I can mount as a hard drive. I then formatted it in ext3 and was able to install software to it w/o any problems. Until I rebooted. When installing software using the package manager, I found that I would often SEGFAULT if I tried to install more than 2 or 3 things at once(including dependencies). After a while it would SEGFAULT constantly and I would have to reboot. When I rebooted I would then have to manually mount the loopback partition, and run through a serious of commands for all the symlinks to be recreated. If the software was installed directly on the CF card, it tried to create the symlinks on its own, but it didn’t for the loopback partition.

Anyway, I created a bunch of scripts to make all this easier, and once I had all the software I wanted installed, I started looking into some way to synchronize my PIM data with my desktop. If my desktop was running Linux I believe it would have been simple. But as it is I didn’t find anything to work with my Windows desktop running Outlook. There is Qtopia Desktop, but I couldn’t get the latest version of it to run on Windows XP, and the earlier version that I could get to run I couldn’t get to sync with my PDA or with Outlook though it’s supposed to sync with both. So then I found the KDE PIM package. It worked! I was able to import my Outlook info(though not sync) and sync with my PDA. But it ran incredibly SLOOOOOWWWWW on the Ipaq, probably because it was running form the CF, but I couldn’t free up enough memory to install it to the ROM.

So here’s my conclusion. Linux on the PDA is definitely something I want to explore some more. The Sharp Zaurus looks great and comes with Linux already installed. I’ve read plenty about people running Linux on the Ipaq and having a good experience. But if you want to run Linux on an Ipaq, get one with a 32MB ROM or more. All the problems I had really came about from the simple reason that I didn’t have enough memory. The CF card is a great way to store data, but no suggested for running apps from.

So I bit the bullet and put WinCE back on my Ipaq for now. When I did I plugged it in and in 30 seconds had all my PIM data on it. I’m not giving up for good, but I’m too busy to put any more time into Linux on my Ipaq for now:(

I made it to Houston without anything interesting to report. Now I’m just chillin’ a bit until 5:30 when we get together for dinner. I think I have just enough time for a nap.

Today is our 10th Wedding Anniversary!!!

I love you, Vivian!