ye ol' annual new years risk game!

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Ken Burcham

view from my pendleton office share office

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Ken Burcham

Aunt Kathy makes dessert YUM

Fudge, Brownies, Cheesecake and Cobbler...  THANK YOU Aunt Kathy!  "It doesn't get any better than this"

Winter morning in Pendleton, OR

See and download the full gallery on posterous

michelle's new house

(lord willing!)

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Ken Burcham

my 3 ladies

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Ken Burcham

day 1 new office

it came with the elf there to run errands and take out the trash

migration experience with new imac

so like, this was the weirdest experience ever...

got the new 27" imac which is absolutely enormous. hurts my neck turning side to side to take everything in. i think they should curve the screen since it could wrap 180 around my head...  

ran time machine backup on the laptop with my external hard drive.

when it finished, I plugged external hard drive into the new mac.

clicked through the welcome stuff and chose to copy my files from a time machine backup.

took a little less than an hour to copy all the files...

and voila! everything is moved to my new imac, ready to go! desktop! settings! programs! files!

I am completely and totally sitting at my mac just as it was.  I could just jump right back into work! it remembers my passwords, settings for everything, etc. etc....  it is as if its whole brain just jumped two feet to the right (my laptop is two feet to the left).

amazing.

stupendous.

i love apple for making my life so easy.

I cringe to think what i would have been in for if I was running a PC...  just look at the windows XP -> windows 7 upgrade process: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/help/upgrading-from-windows-xp-to-windows-7 ... involves a clean install of windows 7, a reinstall of EVERY SINGLE application, re-setup of EVERY SINGLE setting, etc)...  It'd take a full day just to get going again and another week or so of tweaks to get things back the way you like it...

just... wow...

beautiful morning

warmed up to 20 this morning... cold and beautiful. this is the view from our front room window (at least for now! soon it will be stacy and lindseys if all goes well!)

brrr even colder this morning

minus 4... dang! might not let the kids out to sled today... freeze their noses right off!

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Ken Burcham

cold here today!

snow didnt quite make it

we almost got some snow!
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A sharp edge, that.

What is, therefore, the task of the [church] today?
Shall I answer: "Faith, hope and love"?
That sounds beautiful.
But I would say--Courage.
No, even that is not challenging enought to be the whole truth.
Our task today is Recklessness.

For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature,

we lack a holy rage.

The recklessness that comes from the knowledge of God and humanity.

The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets...

and when the lie rages across the face of the earth--

a holy anger about things that are wrong in the world.

To rage against the ravaging of God's earth,

and the destruction of God's world.

To rage when little children must die of hunger,

when the tables of the rich are sagging with food.

To rage at the senseless killing of so many,

and against the madness of militaries.

To rage at the lie that calls the threat of death and the strategy of destruction--Peace.

To rage against complacency.

To restlessly seek the recklessness that will challenge and seek to change

human history until it conforms with the norms of the Kingdom of God.

And remember the signs of the Christian Church have always been--

the Lion, the Lamb, the Dove, and the Fish...

but never the chameleon.

Kaj Munk (as quoted in Frost, M., Exiles.)

3d crawfish parts identifier

any of you real biology teachers out there can check our work, but it looks pretty good to me... :)

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Ken Burcham

armen kleine crawfish

not sure why boys feel the need to impale the poor creature and set her head on a lance... probably some medeival thing. although, truth be told, it was the girls that totally obliterated their specimen into tiny bits.

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Ken Burcham

crawfish dissection!

day 2 of our biology dissection adventure. more complex systems than the ol earthworm esp the mouthpieces.

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Ken Burcham

What art can do

This is amazing: http://www.swiss-miss.com/2010/10/2011-ted-prize-winner.html

"JR is an anonymous photographer and artist and the 2011 TED Prize winner. In his work, JR embeds into neighborhoods, favelas and villages around the world, photographing the people who live there and learning their stories — and then pasting his striking images onto massive local canvases: buildings, buses, roads and bridges. His latest global art project is called “Women Are Heroes.”  

Michelle's view at womens retreat

Looks like a nice place

Saturday morning pancakes

My pancake helpers

Biology class: Dissecting earth worms

Here's our first class of actual dissection. I spent about an hour reading up on worms and their anatomy... it was so fun! I shoulda been a teacher. :)

US Physics Professor takes APS to task on Global Warming

Personally, I've long held grave reservations about the "science" behind what seems to be a politico-economic motivated overabundance of enthusiasm about global warming. When someone like Harold Lewis resigns from the APS in disgust (and with such devastating critique) you have to hope people would be unable to blindly accept the party line without at least some critical thinking and hopefully investigation.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100058265/us-physics-professor-global-warming-is-the-greatest-and-most-successful-pseudoscientific-fraud-i-have-seen-in-my-long-life/

exerpts:

US physics professor: 'Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life'

"...How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society."

Pattern your business like this

...for many goods and services, new business frameworks are emerging: federations of enterprises—from a variety of sectors—that share collaborative values and goals are increasingly capable of distributing valued assets directly to individuals, enabling them to determine exactly what they will consume, as well as when and how. 

In other words: mashups aren't just about software...

from:

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Strategy/Strategic_Thinking/Creating_value_in_the_age_of_distributed_capitalism_2666

Gorgeous day

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Ken Burcham
Ken Burcham Consulting

(Sent from my iPhone)

Huntin with the rigs

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Ken Burcham
Ken Burcham Consulting

(Sent from my iPhone)

ReminderTxt.com via email (beta)

Now you can try out ReminderTxt.com via email. Send an email to "post@remindertxt.com" to get started.

Make the subject of your email message something like this:

to: post@remindertxt.com
subject: (today 5pm) Don't forget to stop at the grocery store on the way home!

If remindertxt.com doesn't know you, it'll send you a reply asking for your cell number.

Give it a try! Here are some other ideas for what you can say on the subject line:

(today 15min) remind me to call Michelle!
(today 10pm) Leave for your doctor's appointment
(20 min) go to the meeting!
(5:20pm) stop at the store on your way home
(tomorrow) Andre's birthday
(tomorrow 8am) Don't forget your briefcase today!
(4/1/10 10am) April fools! do a trick on someone.
(12/1/10 8am) plan christmas shopping

If it breaks, please send me feedback: ken@damrei.com

One thing: right now it'll default you to the Pacific timezone. :) email me your timezone and I'll set it for you.

ken.

Our mad teen Sunday school class

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Ken Burcham
Ken Burcham Consulting

(Sent from my iPhone)

My retaining wall for my retaining wall

So I hope u can't tell I don't have any idea what I'm doing. Looks good to me tho.

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Ken Burcham
Ken Burcham Consulting

(Sent from my iPhone)

"ozzie" reads my mail

Today's Oswald Chambers hits the mark for me: 

http://utmost.org/the-go-of-preparation/

The "Go" of Preparation...

Tag:building

I've already torn down and replaced the old retaining wall and leveled out the ground. Now I'm adding the concrete underlayment. Soon a concrete pa and then a shop!

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Ken Burcham
Ken Burcham Consulting

(Sent from my iPhone)

this posterious update came straight from the ol' txt msg on the iphone... Cool! I can blogtxt.

Getting started with Posterous

Today I started with Posterous. If you google my history, you can see that I rarely update just about any of the many blogs I've started, facebook account, linkedin, you name it. They all get equally ignored.

I have some small hope that with Posterous things could be different.

First, it works by sending an email to "post@posterous.com" to make your blog posts. What could be easier?! Second, you can tie in facebook, linkedin, google blog, etc. so that they all get updated with a new post when you send the email. Nice! Third, you can attach pictures, video and all sorts of things.

Seems easy and fun and more importantly: I might actually use it. You'll know I didn't if this is the last post for like 3 years.

Enjoying present chapters

The only thing I can figure is that since I'm always so damn nostalgic about chapters of my life that are over, I should enjoy the one I'm in. It won't be long and I'll be looking back, all wistful that this one is over.

Dealing with mercy

Later this morning I'll speak on Romans 12:1-8 about offering yourself as a 'living sacrifice'. It makes no sense to sacrifice your life for the sake of others. What makes sense is holding on to what little I have in an this cold and unfair world. But Paul doesn't say 'Hey, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice' rather he says 'In view of God's mercy offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.' God's mercy stuns me.

I've been guilty and I've been punished for it plenty of times. I've been guilty and gotten away with it. I recognize the beauty and goodness and perfection there is in the world and admit I have sometimes chosen against it, reveling in the opposite instead. Were the Great Judge to render a verdict in a booming voice I'd hear GUILTY and the Judge would be just and right. I'd have no worthy defense.

Mercy is the engine of the change in my life. Whereas I stood guilty with no defense, there was another in the room, bright and perfect. "God was pleased to look on him and pardon me." How could it be...? As I walk out, breathing deep the air of freedom, knowing I do not deserve it, I have one response: gratitude. Gratitude for mercy fractures my heart into a thousand shards of joy, peace, excitement, wonder... and a will to worship this merciful one, to please Him. To live worthy of what I could not earn. To be a 'living sacrifice.' I want to show mercy, too, and be like him.

cas 3.3.5 and utf8 passwords SUCCESS

Finally, everything is working to have CAS correctly handle authentication with utf8 passwords. The final remaining bugaboo was in my own code. We wrap CAS inside of our own value-added service and use HttpClient to communicate with CAS. HttpClient doesn't encode the posted form fields as utf8 unless you ask it to:

authpost.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8");

Now we're back in business. Of course, that leaves me wondering: Did the utf8 passwords ever work before? I was operating under the assumption that I had tested the system last year to make sure foreign/special character passwords would be allowed. But if I wasn't sending utf8 passwords via HttpClient, I can hardly see how they could have been working. Perhaps that was just a gross oversight on my part.

Getting sourcecode to show in blogger

This blog entry shared a nifty trick to get the xml snippet to show up properly below. There are a couple of files you have to download and copy somewhere but now that is done I'll be able to simply wrap any code like so:

 some code to show!
 

cas 3.3.5 and utf8 passwords

After we upgraded to CAS 3.3.5 users with foreign character passwords failed authentication. Two things were missing:

in /WEB-INF/web.xml I added the following filter:

SetCharacterEncodingFilter
org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter

    encoding
    UTF-8


    forceEncoding
    true




SetCharacterEncodingFilter
/*

 

And then on top.jsp and casLoginView.jsp I needed to add this line:

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>

And now we're back in business.

getting wireshark up on osx

I downloaded wireshark, which is a very nice looking packet sniffer, in order to try to see if the communication between CAS (3.3.5) and the ldap server is indeed utf8. (for some reason, every time I try to use a utf8 password, CAS won't recognize it as valid, even if it is). We didn't have this problem with CAS 3.3.

Anyhow, I have wireshark and it looks great! However it didn't see any interfaces to monitor. After a quick google, i need to give my user permission to the bpf interface device. Here's the magic:

sudo chown {your account name} /dev/bpf*

I'm not going to run wireshark that often, I expect, so I'll modify the permissions for this session, but check out http://www.wireshark.org/lists/wireshark-users/200608/msg00014.html if you want the new permission to persist between reboots.