openswitch

I’m listening to my “90s music collection” of well over a hundred songs that were released between 1990 and 1999 and I’m getting all nostalgic now. Dang.

I began discovering music around 1992 in middle school but really got “into” music in high school. Through the influence of those I hung around (I ran with a very eclectic group of individuals) I was listening to virtually every genre of music around at the time. Keep in mind that I graduated high school in 1997.

On any given day I might enjoy a little White Zombie — you know, “easy listening” tracks like More Human Than Human — and then immediately put in the Blind Melon CD and mellow out to No Rain. I enjoyed listening to old James Taylor, new(ish) Paul Simon and a little Metallica thrown in for good measure (is there anyone who doesn’t like Enter Sandman?) often back to back to back.

But I’m not here to tell you about my wide range of musical tastes. No, this article doesn’t have a dominant theme like that. You see, the 90s was the period of my life when A LOT of what makes me “me” was formed. In the 90s I found Christ — or He found me—. In the 90s I found myself. The act of finding Christ can only be attributed to Him. But the act of finding myself had a lot to do with the music with which I surrounded myself. And it’s for that reason that I’m writing now. I think that if I share with you some of the formative musical influences in my past that you may just get a better glimpse of me.

The following list of music represents songs from the 90s that heavily influenced me in one way or another. Some of the songs simply moved me and still continue to move me today. Other songs just evoked a gut-level reaction that’s almost impossible to explain.

Each item in the list below is linked to a last.fm page where you can listen to a sample of the song I’m referring to.

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Under The Bridge

Live – Lightning Crashes

Metallica – Enter Sandman

Stone Temple Pilots – Interstate Love Song

The Verve – Bittersweet Symphony

Blind Melon – No Rain

The Smashing Pumpkins – Tonight, Tonight

Beck – Loser

Collective Soul – The World I Know

Guns N’ Roses – November Rain

R.E.M. – Everybody Hurts

Soul Asylum – Misery

Filter – Hey Man Nice Shot

The Smashing Pumpkins – Disarm

Gin Blossoms – Hey Jealousy

Live – I Alone

Green Day – Basket Case

Spin Doctors – Two Princes

The Wallflowers – One Headlight

Primitive Radio Gods – Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth

The Verve Pipe – The Freshmen

Live – All Over You

Prodigy – Firestarter

U2 – Mysterious Ways

Green Day – Good Riddance

Rammstein – Du Hast

Lo Fidelity Allstars – Battle Flag

Goo Goo Dolls – Iris

Counting Crows – Mr. Jones

White Zombie – More Human Than Human

I’m interested to know what you think of this list.

Remember when you were a kid and you’d make flip books? On one page you’d draw a stick man in one position and then, like a cartoonist, you would draw a succession of many stick men, each on their own page. Then when you would flip through the book with your thumb and watch the stick man perform whatever animation you had created.

Well, now that we have digital cameras and computers we as adults can be kids again, making digital flip books like this:

My wife and I made this movie as part of Vacation Bible School at our church this summer. It’s not professional, but it was a lot of fun to make and I think it’s fun to watch. Now that you know what the end result looks like, let me tell you how we did it.

The supply list

1. A digital camera
2. A tripod
3. A friend
4. A computer
5. Video editing software functionally similar to Windows Movie Maker

Step #1: Take your photos

For this kind of project I found it easiest to use a tripod and a friend. I suppose you could do this without a friend if you had a remote release but hey, who wants to be alone? The tripod is virtually essential as it is much more stable than your hands and the end result is tremendously better than if the camera is hand held. The goal is to create a movie in which only the subject is moving and if the background is shaky or the camera changes position even slightly it tends to ruin the effect.

Find a place to shoot your photos and decide ahead of time what path you want to take. Then go to your starting point and have your friend snap a picture. Move a little along your planned path of travel, stop, and have your friend snap another pic. Do this until you reach the end of your path.

It’s worth mentioning here that when I had my friend snap the photo I made sure I always had the same expression on my face and my body was in roughly the same position. I chose to keep my knees together for consistency and my feet behind me in each photo until I got close to the camera and then slowly stood up.

Step #2: Import all your stills to Movie Maker

Open Movie Maker and in the Movie tasks sidebar select the option called Import pictures. Select all of the still photos you want to use in this movie by Ctrl+click or Shift+click. Once you’ve selected all the photos for this particular movie click Import.

Step #3: Adjust storyboard settings

Before we add any of the photos to the storyboard we’ll have to change some settings. By default Movie Maker will display each photo for 5 seconds. This will not create the desired effect. We need Movie Maker to cycle through the photos very quickly.

Go to Tools > Options > Advanced and change the Picture Duration from 5 seconds to 0.125 seconds. Also, change the Transition Duration from 5 seconds to 0.25 seconds. This will create the effect we’re looking for: a rapid succession of still photos.

Step #4: Add stills to storyboard

This is simple. If your pictures are already in the order you want then you can select them all and drag the whole group of them to the storyboard. Movie Maker should order them appropriately. See my screen shot if you need some visuals.

If you don’t want to do it like that in bulk then you can drag each photo to the storyboard one at a time. In this way you could even make the movie run backward by putting the last slide first and working in reverse. Seeing a person going backwards up a slide, for instance, is always a pleasant effect.

Step #5: Prepare your audio

What’s a movie without some audio? Boring, that’s what it is.

Above the storyboard at the bottom of the screen click the option that says Show Timeline. Zoom in if you need to. You’re looking to see how long your movie is, note how many seconds, or minutes (which would be a lot of photos) your movie will run. Now you know how long your audio piece has to be.

To edit audio I always turn to Audacity. It’s free, open source and frankly, I’ve never needed to do anything with audio that this program could not accomplish. Keep in mind, however, that I’m not a recording artist ;). For Mac’s, I hear that GarageBand is the Pi

It is my responsibility to say yes to the leadership of Jesus. It is your responsibility to say yes to it for you. Our destiny and maturity in God is ultimately up to us. We have to lay hold of it for ourselves.

So what are you waiting for?

—Shawn Blanc

I admittedly have only had extensive experience with two content management systems (CMS’s): WordPress and Textpattern. I have had other less-involved experience (really just testing) with CMS’s like Drupal and Blogger but I’m hardly an expert with these.

Appropriately I’m writing tell you not about the CMS’s that I don’t have much experience with but about those with which I’ve had some time to get very familiar, Textpattern (TXP) and WordPress (WP).

As I was writing this article I came to the realization that I’m probably going to get lots of WP experts and TXP hackers that will correct me on uber-technical details of code snippets and implementation. I expect and welcome this but it bears mentioning that I’m more advanced in my knowledge of WP (and to a lesser extent, TXP) than the ‘average’ user so if I get confused by this stuff then a new(er) user will most certainly be stumped. Thus, I stand by my original assertion that TXP is easier to learn and more robust than WP; especially for a new user.

I’m not here to bash WP. It’s a great blogging application and I’ve had more experience with it than TXP. I’ve seen some amazing things done with WP and I loved it so much that I even released a theme built on it (I may yet port unsleepable to TXP). It was my entry point to self-hosted blogging and overall, the community is patient, knowledgeable and very self-giving.

Template tags

Now that I’ve had a chance to learn TXP I have to say that it’s MUCH easier to use and MUCH more flexible than WP. TXP and WP are both built using PHP and MySQL. But the major difference between WP and TXP is that TXP uses template tags to manipulate the PHP and WP uses (somewhat) raw PHP. The raw PHP isn’t hard to use per se, but I have to admit that it took me a lot longer to figure out and use it than it did for me to learn the TXP template tags.

Site architecture

The way TXP breaks down a site also feels more natural to me. It breaks it down into sections. Each section then uses a certain page template. Then each page template is build using different forms. Forms can be thought of a code snippets. It’s hard to describe to a non-TXP user, but once you get in there and use the interface you’ll realize that it’s much more flexible than WP. Let me put it this way, while TXP feels more natural to me it’s not necessarily as simple as WP. WP was built to be a blogging engine, TXP was built to manage any kind of site you can imagine, including blogs.

Always remember than simplicity is inversely related to flexibility.

No nonsense software

One of the things that always bugged me about WordPress was the main admin page. It assumes that I want a bunch of information that I really don’t care about. I don’t care how many comments my blog has, and I especially don’t care what the WP developers were writing about on their blogs. In fact, that always seemed to me to be a cheap trick just to get more people reading the dev’s blogs by foisting their feeds on every WP user on the planet.

By contrast when you go to the TXP main admin page it assumes only one thing: that you want to write something.

Conclusion

So, apart from simple template tags, a more flexible site architecture, and the fact that TXP doesn’t push goofy stuff in your face, it’s not too different from WP. Both are very fast CMS’s (if WP is using the WP-cache plugin), both are reasonably good at blocking comment spam (though I find TXP to be better at it) and both are open source software with huge, helpful communities behind them.

WordPress is a great blogging application but Textpattern is the way Content Management is supposed to be.

“Stepping out for a bit. Good thing there’s that key under the front porch rug in case I need it…wait…UNSEND UNSEND!!!!”

—John Stansbury

In a previous post, Mathew asked a good question regarding the inspiration of Scripture, the human element and, by implication, the inerrancy of it all:

Many years ago I would have identified myself as a born again Christian (not any more, but that

Yesterday I started a new snack system in my youth group. While I’m going to wait for the experiment period to end before I disclose all the data I think it’s interesting to note that last night there were only 4 students that showed up and already one of them stole a soda. Well, they paid 3 cents for a 50 cent soda. That’s basically stealing. They just dropped coins in the coffee can so we would all think they were paying for it. Honestly, who do they think they’re fooling?

Some time back near the beginning of this year I decided to try a little economic experiment with my youth group in the form of snacks without prices (original post here). The experiment essentially consisted of me spending $50 of my own money on snacks for the youth group. The snacks had no listed price but I put up signs and informed the students that while the food “had no listed price they were most definitely not free.” I repeatedly reminded students to pay for what they took. When they asked me how much they should pay I had a stock phrase I used every time, “Whatever you think is right.”

That meant, I explained to them, that I expected them to put in the money box the amount which they felt a particular snack was worth. It was the honor system to the n ^th degree.

Throughout the course of this experiment I replaced no snacks. I let the initial round of snacks become exhausted and then saw how close I was to recouping the $50 spent initially. My plan was to buy a new round of snacks using the money the students ‘donated’. Hypothetically I consider a 80% recoup to be a success as I can stand a 20% loss in this kind of endeavor.

At the end of each month I counted the money paid. The snacks are now all gone and I’m here to inform you that the experiment has yielded the following results:

Initial seed money = $50

First month total = $8.86

Second month total = $13.13

Third month total = $17.63

Fourth month total = $23.72

Sixth month total = $25.11

Total percent of money recouped = 50.22%

The amount of money donated was seemingly random and sporadic. At some points I would see someone drop in a few coins for a rather large amount of snacks; at other times I would see them drop in a couple dollars for a soda. Some students took hand fulls of snacks without paying for any of it.

It’s also worth noting that initially the students seemed to be excited about the idea of snacks without prices. But near the end they seemed to not take it very seriously and just took food without paying.

Currently I’m giving up this idea and making official prices for all food items. Payment will still be on the honor system but there will be set prices in place.

I’ll be recording the resulting information and will report it here after several months of data are collected. This time I’m going to keep more detailed records by checking the amount of money in the money box each week instead of each month. I’ll also try to note other pertinent information such as weekly attendance and weather. Both of which (I would imagine) might possibly affect giving.

Can you think of any other information I should be recording to make this study more robust?

“In your community, are you called to the gospel of Christ, or are you called to be the moral police?”

—Chris Seay

The history

A couple weeks ago I and several other bloggers using Textpattern (TXP) experienced a surge of robot-based comment spam. The spam comments had author names of random alpha numeric strings and the comments they left were equally random. They were quite obviously robot-based due to the nature of the comment.

This was a very odd occurrence due to the default ‘preview’ button on the comment form in TXP. Most blogging CMS’s have only a ‘submit’ button so a robot can (somewhat) more easily create spam comments. But when there’s a ‘preview’ button it tends to (again, somewhat) throw off the vast majority of robots leaving only human spammers to worry about.

Until this recent surge in TXP comment spam the ‘preview’ button solution seemed to be all that was necessary to curb comment spam. But it seemed as if someone had written a robot specifically for TXP as it was repeatedly getting around the ‘preview’ button.

As I was discussing this with Nathan Smith he noted that he too had been dealing with some rather strange robot-based comment spam. In a fit of inspiration he sat back for (I kid you not) literally 1 minute and churned out this little bit of javascript that makes the ‘preview’ button on TXP sites invisible to robots, thus eliminating robot-based comment spam. Thanks, Nathan!

The hack

Normally I wouldn’t promote this kind of a hack because it is (as Nathan pointed out to me) heavy-handed and tends to be ghetto in its implementation due to the use of document.write(). But regardless of its messiness the fact remains that it works very well. Since implementing this on openswitch I haven’t had any comment spam from robots, it’s a great feeling.

The hack is very simple. Open up your comment_form template. Replace

<txp:comments_preview />

with

<script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ document.write(<input type="submit" name"preview" value="Preview" class="button" />); //]]></script>

Simple, right? Making the ‘preview’ button javascript it now becomes invisible to robots. The name has to always remain ‘preview’ in order for TXP to recognize what the button does, but the value can be changed to anything you want. Remember, this is a heavy-handed ghetto fix but it works so well that I wanted to share it. Enjoy a dramatic drop in the already low prevalence of TXP comment spam!