It’s rather sad. Here’s a news story about high school seniors protesting against exit exams with a photo of a (presumable) student holding a sign which seems to read, “Let Are Kids Walk.” Seriously?
Gerhard Czech recently wrote a nice overview of using Tellico, Tellico Bedienungsanleitung. Yup, it’s in German. Here’s a quote:
Tellico ist ein Programm mit dem es auf einfache Art und Weise möglich ist kleine Datenbanken zu erstellen. Dabei benutzt Tellico für die Datenbanken die Bezeichnung Sammlungen.
Jede Sammlung kann beliebig viele Datensätze (Tellico benutzt hierfür die Bezeichnung Einträge) enthalten, jeder Eintrag wiederum beliebig viele Felder. Tellico speichert diese Sammlungen in einer einzigen Datei (Dateiendung .tc).
It’s always neat whenever Tellico gets mentioned in a distribution review, implying that Tellico’s inclusion was notable. In this case, linux.com mentions it in their review of Vector Linux SOHO 5.8.
Thanks to the work of Doruk Fişek, Tellico is now in the Pardus Linux package tree. Thanks to the work of Ali Isingor and Kunter Kutlu, it is completely translated in Turkish, bringing to 15 the number of languages into which Tellico has been translated with 70% or better coverage. Pretty cool!
Asa points to the recent article about Spirit discovering more evidence of past Martian water. I could pull a life-lesson out of the discovery, one of those when life gives you lemons… types of lessons. The reason that the water evidence was found is because one of Spirit’s wheels is busted now, and dragging it along the ground exposes deeper soil types. How about that!
And Opportunity is still running around, too. Phoenix launches in about 3 months. I didn’t work on it, but the engineers and scientists reached frenetic pace on it a few months back. ATLO is still going on.
I just read an article about something I’ve often wondered about. On the days when I need to take off from work to go see the doctor or have a plumber visit, I see so many people out and about. Who are these people who are idle during normal work hours? It’s a pretty interesting article.
By rights our parks and movie theaters and stores should be minor ghost towns between 9 and 5 — chanced upon by the occasional tourist or late-night bartender but otherwise peaceful. Instead, they’re inexplicably packed. I didn’t doubt that the packers had sound explanations. I just wanted to hear them.
Tourists, disabled folks, freelance writers, self-employed, etc. That’s what the answer is. And apparently, there’s a heck of a lot more of those people than I would have guessed.
JPL is having its 2007 Open House this weekend. The banners and food stands and tents are already going up all over work. I believe we entertain over 100,000 people in two days, which is pretty darn impressive.
For a while yesterday, we had a lot of helicopters circling over work. None of us knew why. Come to find out, there was a bear wandering around the arroyo. Go figure!
My friend, Rene, blogged about an article on Boundless Line referencing some quotes from Dr. Albert Mohler and Dr. John Piper on singleness. I’ve known Rene almost since I moved to southern California, and for a scientist, he’s a great guy!
Occasionally, we exchange emails about thoughts on marriage or dating, or more often, the Dodgers, Trojans, and Bruins. His final point is a pretty good one:
I love high ideals. I need them because they provide something to aim for. But I live in reality where I fall short of those ideals. The people in the 6 categories above need help and I’m sure they feel the intramural food fight over whether marriage is the normative ideal is too removed from their reality.
Along the same lines, Boundless has another post on surrendering the desire to be wed. There’s some really good stuff there. Things that I’ve spent time talking with my parents about. Things I’ve had to confess to the Lord.
Unmet desires remind us that God is our source of help and provision. Hannah is another example; she prayed to God in agony over her unmet desire — to have a child. God responds by granting her request, not chastening her. Squelching a godly desire has the potential to make us less dependent on God, not more. Instead, respect the desires God has given you and continue to ask Him for good gifts.
That’s a good warning.
One of the comments on the article says, I think a lot of singles are fearful of admitting a desire to get married. It makes a person vulnerable, to talk about that. I can relate to that. The couple of times that it’s come up in my small group Bible study in the past several years, the discussion doesn’t really go anywhere. I do have to remind myself that it is not a bargain to be made with God - that once I become ok with being single, I’ll instantly be ready to be married. That’s a fallacy.
This makes me laugh:
It’s a discrimination that’s widespread but largely unspoken, causing pain and stress to the affected couples, who often find it hard to talk about, even to each other. I’m talking, of course, about marrying outside your looks. Marrying a few degrees up or down the hotness scale. Refusing to stay within your cute-gory.
It’s true, I’ll admit to noticing couples and thinking, “Gee, he’s really working outside his class…” Oh, the subtle tones of interfacial discrimination.
If you suspect that you might be in an interfacial marriage, don’t be ashamed. Acceptance is the first step to recovery.
I’m going to go ahead and push a new version of Tellico, even with the mailing list issues. Tellico 1.2.11 is available. The changelog includes:
- Improved save time by caching image info on load.
- Fixed crashing bug for OpenOffice.org connection.
- Fixed bug that could lose images when loading from XML.
- Fixed sorting for Dependent fields to match on subfields.
- Updated IMDb search.
- Fixed CDDB lookup for OpenBSD, patch from Marc Espie.
There seems to be a problem with Tellico’s mailing list. I’ve sent several emails to it in the last few days, and none have showed up in the archives. I’ve had direct contact with a few users who say they haven’t received anything either. So I wrote the forge-dev mailing list and filed a bug.
I don’t know if the problem is spam blocking or an actual issue with the mailing list software. I’m beginning to look at hosting the mailing list and maybe the SVN and website elsewhere. Stay tuned…