We took Horse Heaven trail to the bottom, and the last 2/3 was a killer. It’s VERY steep after Hidden Valley.

Photos from the hike:

It is a faith in our own answers to these questions that guides us through decisions in what to do with our life.  It also acts as a filter on our experiences that colors our perception of those experiences.  We’re stubborn creatures, and we’re particularly good at attributing the cause of an event to make it fit within our personal faith structure.

• “Haitians made a pact with the devil, therefore there was a giant earthquake there.”
• “You insulted a man last month so Karma is paying you back with financial woes.”
• “I helped an old woman cross the street, so God is rewarding me with this job promotion.”
• “We prayed that the police would find that girl, and they did.  Prayer works!”

A particularly interesting faith-based behavior I’ve taken note of lately is that of the last example — prayer.  I can fully get behind the “let’s stay on the righteous path” or “rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub” kind of prayer, but I have issues with prayer whose intent is to actually affect change in the world.  This hits the point of the title of this post — do practitioners of this type of prayer really think that God is a democracy?

For example, I have a friend who was traveling.  She asked her friends on Facebook to pray for a safe flight.

Really?  So without your friends begging for your safe passage over the Pacific, God would smoteth that 757 deep into thine salty waters in a ball of hellfire?  Do rational people actually believe that this is how their all powerful God works?

Another example is praying for a diseased person to be well again.  I’m all for lending support to people or families going through difficult times, and donating to organizations who are advancing the science of wellness.  But again — without your votes of prayer, God will decide that not enough people care about this sick person’s well being and let them wither away in a hospital bed?  Or that now more than ten people have gathered in a circle in a church basement, joined hands, and asked for the sick to be healed (visual: blue beams of light emanating from each person’s head rising to the heavens in a majestic column of Want), so he is now obligated to banish the tumor from the sick person’s brain.  Really?

If there is an all powerful supreme being sitting on a cloud somewhere with angels brushing his golden beard, I think the last thing he will do is to run his universe as an episode of American Idol, with only the most voted-on causes moving on to the next round and everything else getting booted from the show.

Please let me know in the comments if I have completely missed a crucial point in understanding this phenomenon.

This one is simple, but I’m surprised that not enough people know it.  My tip secret to divide the bill total by six.

Others use shortcuts like “twice tax”, but that works out to over 18% now.  Still a decent baseline to round up or down from.  Another shortcut is “divide by ten then add half again”.  Divide by six is equivalent to 16.6%.  Let’s do a few tests to see what is easiest…

The bill is $24.52.  Divide by six gives you $4 pretty quickly.  Divide by ten and half again is $2.45 then what’s half of that … ok $1.20.  $2.45 + $1.20 is $3.65.  That was a lot more work!

The bill is $125.  Divide by six gives you “Around $20 or $21″.  Divide by ten and half again is $12.50 plus $6.25, that gets us close to $19.  But how much more effort was that?

Credit Card Whole Dollars

WTF is up with people who do all this subtraction when calculating a tip so that the total charged to their credit card is a whole dollar amount?  I mean really people — what are you trying to accomplish?  Do you keep a running total in your head — to the nearest PENNY — of your credit card?  Then the poor server has to do all kinds of penny-precise math and finding of small change on account of your obsession with zeroes.  REALLY!

Photos available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thenobot/sets/72157622954200256/

Some pictures from Thanksgiving weekend 2009.

No kites allowed!

Silly:

Lyrics:
Going for a walk
Going over the corn field
Come to a cave
Stretch out your hand
Touch a wet nose
Oh it’s a bear!
Open the door,
Home at last…

A couple weeks back, I came across a site that publishes the time and path of visible satellites called Heavens Above. You tell it where you are, and it tells you what you can see. Simple! Here is a page that lists very bright objects visible from San Jose, CA. If you alter the minimum brightness value (a higher magnitude number), then more items will be listed. All kinds of satellites are up there. From communications satellites, to weather tracking devices, to the bodies of rockets used to place satellites in orbit. During the last Space Shuttle mission, I was able to see it pass overhead while docked to the ISS. Of course, it was just a pinpoint of light, but it was very cool to know that the little dot of light was housing a group of people.

The couple of hours after sunset and before sunrise are the best times to see satellites, since the satellite will still be illuminated by the sun — most are 500-1500km above the Earth. NASA has a tool called J-Track 3D that helps you visualize just how much is up there, and how far away it is.

So if you’re looking for something to do on these warm summer nights, what could be better than gazing at stars watching for some of man’s greatest work to silently slide by overhead.

At the moment, these are the satellites I’ve seen over the last week:

• 2009/04/20 21:13 - Cosmos 1943 Rocket
• 2009/04/19 20:46 - Cosmos 1500 Rocket
• 2009/04/18 21:51 - Cosmos 1943 Rocket
• 2009/04/18 21:39 - Resurs 1-4 Rocket
• 2009/04/15 20:17 - Lacrosse 5
• 2009/04/14 21:12 - Resurs 1-4
• 2009/04/14 21:09 - Lacrosse 5
• 2009/04/14 20:43 - TRMM
• 2009/04/13 20:53 - TRMM
• 2009/04/12 22:14 - MetOp-A

One technique we used a lot in my previous company was to allocate a column in a database to be a “catch-all” for various attributes, in the form of a serialized hash. The advantage here is that if we want to add an attribute to a table, we would not need to alter the table unless we absolutely had to in order to facilitate SELECTs or ORDERing. When we’d read a row from the table, we would de-serialize that column and make that hash available to whatever uses it.

Ruby on Rails’ ActiveRecord class handles this seamlessly. Just tell your model to serialize the column like so:

class MyModelClass < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :data
end

data is the name of the column that holds the serialized data.

If you want to enforce the type of data that can be serialized/deserialized, add the type name:

class MyModelClass < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :data, MyDataClass
end

You can then call methods on the object represented in the data column by referencing it like this:

row = MyModelClass.find :first
row.data.foobar

assuming MyDataClass implements a method called foobar.

So far so good right? Well, let’s say MyDataClass implements a nice object-model of a hash, so calling MyDataClass#keyname will return the value referenced by the key. You write a bunch of views referencing row.data.foobar or row.data.snafu, but at a later date you decide that you really want to dedicate a column in the database table to the value held by data.foobar. So you have to visit all your views to be sure you make the change from row.data.foobar to row.foobar. Crappy!

Wouldn’t it be nice to just design it from the start so that you could call row.foobar? That way, it’s at the model’s discretion whether a bit of data is stored in the serialized column or a “real” column. Nice, right?

Well, it’s pretty easy to do. We’ll define a Mix-In that we’ll load into certain model classes. This mix-in will override the method_missing and respond_to? methods of the class with our own design.

Here is the content of lib/model_data_column.rb:

##
# Model Data Column Mix-In
# Include this in your data model if you use 'data' as a serialized object.
# This will let you call "model.foo" rather than "model.data.foo"
# to facilitate moving data between the serialized 'data' column
# and real DB columns.
module ModelDataColumn

  def method_missing(method_id, *args)
    self[:data].send(method_id, args) || super
  end

  def respond_to?(method_id, *args)
    self[:data].send(:respond_to?, method_id) ||
      self[:data].send(:has_key?, method_id.id2name) ||
      super
  end

end

Note: the class behind your serialized column (MyDataClass in this case) needs to implement the method has_key?.

Use it in your model like this:

require 'model_data_column'

class MyModelClass < ActiveRecord::Base
  include ModelDataColumn
  serialize :data, MyDataClass
end

So now you can call methods in your serialized object column without explicitly referencing the column! This means the rest of your application does not need to concern itself with how the model has implemented the storage of the data. It will just work.

There is a danger if the serialized column holds a value with the same key as the name of a database column. The model will always return the value from the DB column in this case. However, the benefits of this model are big enough for us where we will trade that for the need to keep tabs on the names of things we are storing.

So now this old code:

row = MyModelClass.find :first
row.data.foobar

And this new code:

row = MyModelClass.find :first
row.foobar

Will have the same output. Huzzah!

20090301 Sluggy Has Dinner from Zack Steinkamp on Vimeo.