Thursday, February 23, 2006

Winter Weekend Continued

Sorry I’m late in posting this. After gushing to Ily about how much fun Isaac and I had on that beautiful day of skiing, I decided to take her and Micah up there two days later on Presidents day. The sky wasn’t as clear but it was much warmer and still very fun. We stopped at frozen Multnomah Falls for a bit, and then continued up to Cooper Spur. There wasn’t anything Micah could do there, so we continued on Highway 35 to Little John Sno Park for some sledding. The boys loved sitting on the sled between our legs, and Ily surprised me by being so willing to hike up the sledding hill over and over. So that was Saturday and Monday of last weekend that Isaac and I spent out in the snow. It was so much better than watching it rain from indoors!

Pictures and movies, of course

Posted by Bryan on February 23, 2006

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Isaac's First Ski Trip

Isaac and I went skiing yesterday at href=“http://www.cooperspur.com/”>Cooper Spur. It was fabulous.
The conditions were the most perfect that I think I have ever seen. A
bitter arctic wind has swept the sky completely clear of clouds and
haze the past few days, and dropped the temperature down into the
teens. The wind was still blowing hard in The Gorge as we drove east
on I-84, which made me nervous about the day ahead, but with Mt. Hood
looming large in front of us our van climbed highway 35 from Hood
River and the wind quickly became calm. At the resort the blazing sun
made 18 degrees feel like 40, and the snow was a fine dry powder. It
was a shades day for sure.

Cooper Spur is the perfect resort for a kid to learn how to ski.
Kids under 7 ski free (or was it 6?), so I only had to pay for my lift
ticket and Isaac’s rentals, which were incredibly cheap. There is a
single double chairlift and a rope tow that cover a whopping 50 acres
of terrain (the big resorts in Utah cover thousands of acres). Kids
music played from the speakers on the tiny little patio at the
miniature lodge, and the rental shop dude told Isaac how “awesome” his
little skis were, cementing Isaac’s early enthusiasm for this
tremendous sport.

I struggled teaching Isaac at first. He proved to be a more
difficult student than Ily and other friends my age I’ve taught.
After a bit of, um, harsh words between us, Isaac wisely called for a
snack break at 10:30. He sat in the sun on the patio while I went to
retrieve the grub from the van. On the way back I stopped at the
ticket/rental office and paid for a group lesson for him. After
apologetically telling Isaac what a horrible teacher I was he became
pretty excited for ski school.

The class was a success, after an hour he was riding the rope tow
and snow plowing down the short bunny hill all by himself. We rode
the inner tubes a bit, broke for lunch, and he was ready for the
chairlift. At least, that’s what he told me. Isaac fearlessly rode
to the top, and even though it took about an hour, and some serious
effort on my part to keep him from giving up and sliding down the hill
on his bum, he made it all the way down. I knew it was a success when
at the bottom he didn’t head straight for the car like he’d
threatened, but for the rope tow to reassure himself that even though
the big hill gave him trouble, he was still master of the bunny hill.
A little more tubing and it was time to head home, with Isaac asking
when we could do it again. Cooper Spur hasn’t seen the last of the
Murdocks.

Be sure and check out the href=”/gallery/isaacs-first-ski-trip”>pictures and video!

Posted by Bryan on February 19, 2006

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Category Specific Feed

The RSS link (that puts the orange icon in the url bar of Firefox) is now category specific. It used to just link to the feed for all categories, no matter where on the site you were. Now, for example, if you are on the Geek topic it links to the Geek feed, or if you are on the About This Site topic, it links to the About This Site feed. Django makes this stuff so easy, I love it!

Posted by Bryan on February 12, 2006

RSS Explanation

I found a better explanation of what rss is, and how to use it. It’s long, but thorough and helpful.

Posted by Bryan on February 12, 2006

Monday, February 6, 2006

And The Rain From Heaven Was Restrained

It may not last long, but the rain finally has taken a break! It’s amazing how many people were outside today, walking dogs, playing at the park, and riding their bikes. Vancouver is beautiful when the rain stops (and it drives you nuts when it hasn’t stopped for months!). It was good to go outside and see our yard again. I wasn’t too surprised to see the moss is winning the fight against the grass. Our fence is broken in two places from the rotting wood and the wind. Besides that it looks really good though. It sure is green.

Posted by Bryan on February 6, 2006

Swap ctrl and caps

I really like having the Ctrl and Caps Lock keys swapped on my keyboard. It makes using emacs just that much better. In the past, on my Linux boxes, I’ve had to write a little xmodmap script to do it. I just learned that Gnome now has an option to do this in the Keyboard Preferences dialog under Layout Options, Control Key Position. Sweet. And who says Gnome isn’t for power users?

For windoze I usually find a regedit script with google, such as this one.

Posted by Bryan on February 6, 2006

Sunday, February 5, 2006

Handy Online Scriptures

I taught a lesson on scripture study today, and in preparing I did some searching at lds.org for material. I also rediscovered The Church’s online scriptures. The search function is really handy. You can type in a reference, such as Alma 7:11, and it give you a link that you can click to bring up that scripture, highlighted. Type in a word like, faith, and it brings up 368 results for you. In sunday school today it was mentioned that Noah was Gabriel. “Is that in the scriptures anywhere?” our teacher asked. “It’s in the Doctrine and Covenants,” a class member assured him. Well, actually, if you search for “noah gabriel“ it apparently isn’t. Expand your search to include scriptures and study helps however, and you find 5 results that explain that Joseph Smith did teach that Noah and Gabriel are one and the same. Cool stuff.

UPDATE: Apparently they have made some updates and changed their links a bit. I’ve tried to update them above, but the Noah Gabriel demo doesn’t quite work the same anymore—I can’t get it to not search the study helps, but you can see that none of the results are in the scriptures. Oh well, cool to see they are constantly improving this!

Posted by Bryan on February 5, 2006

Thursday, February 2, 2006

Subversion Setup

How I set up subversion repositories on my Linux box. I got most of
this form the subversion
book
. I’ll try to link to the specific parts of the book where
each part came from.

First, href=“http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch05s02.html”>create the
repository using fsfs for the database, because I heard it’s way
cooler than Berkeley db. Seriously (no really, I wish I had a better
reason, I read something that I found on Google somewhere that it
was).

svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /path/to/repos/project

Next, set up the project directory tree to be imported. I’m using
what seems to be the standard setup with trunk, branches, and tags
sub-directories, as somewhat explained in the href=“http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch04s02.html”>section on
using branches in the svn book.

mkdir project
mkdir project/tags project/branches project/trunk
cp -r /path/to/work/in/progress/* project/trunk/

Lately it’s a python project I’m putting into subversion so I
remove the .pyc files, they don’t go under revision control so one
more step:

find project/ -name "*.pyc" | xargs rm

Now import it:

svn import project file:///path/to/repos/project -m "initial import"

See that it worked:

svn list file:///path/to/repos/project

To really make sure it worked, href=“http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch03s04.html”>check out
the project somewhere else:

cd /tmp
svn checkout file:///path/to/repos/project/trunk project

And that’s it, as long as you only want local access. I’ve set up
network access through Apache and I need to write that up too (before
I totally forget).

UPDATE: I finally wrote up how to setup subversion over httpd.

Posted by Bryan on February 2, 2006