Milking

I've been doing a relief milking course this week. It's been thoroughly enjoyable, despite getting a taste of cow poo (yuck!): I've been learning a lot about the details of milk treatment, as well as learning to use the tools of the trade - riding all-terain vehicles (4 wheelers) and so on.

But why?

We have a couple of farmers in our congregation, and I'd like to be able to fill in for them in an emergency, or perhaps even just give them a weekend off occasionally. Relief milkers are apparently pretty hard to come by; good ones even rarer. If I can be a reliable, trustworthy fill-in, they have less stress in an emergency or when away on a break. Besides, from my point of view, it makes a welcome change of pace and focus.

Pageset2 pages changed!

Being challenged about your assumptions is a good thing.

Not long ago, Rafael expressed doubt about whether I could really be sure that the part of the image we save before the atomic copy ('pageset2') was really not changing while being saved. So I implemented a simple check, MD5 checksumming all the pages prior to starting to save them, and doing it again afterwards. As a result, I learnt that there are indeed instances where a small number of the pages' contents do change.

So now I'm on the hunt. The question, of course, is "Why?". At the moment, I'm tracing down the functions that add (directly or indirectly) pages to the LRU, to learn more about it's contents. I hope to then be able to see what is special about the pages that are being changed, so that I can either stop them being changed (freeze what's not being frozen at the moment) or use their characteristics to have them put in the atomically copied pages to start with.

All this takes time, however. And I don't have a lot of time at the moment, so it's taking more than usual.

Oh well.

A little less keen on the section of "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist" that I've read since last night. The authors argue that time began with creation, and seem to accept the concept of a Big Bang as equivalent with creation. They also (rightly) mention the Principle of Uniformity, but fail to mention the fact that this is an assumption, accepted by faith.

Still, even with these reservations, I continue to see it as a well written book, and am still interested in reading the remainder.

Ah, so many things to occupy one's time...

My final exam has been approved. All going well, I'll give an account of what I believe before our classis (presbytery if you prefer) on March 16, 2007. If I pass, I'll be ordained as a minister in the Christian Reformed Church of Australia some time afterwards. Practically, it doesn't mean much - I'll continue to serve the same congregation in the same work under the same contract. But it does mean that I'll have finally completed the path that was begun ten years ago, with a trip to Geelong to begin studying at the Reformed Theological College. And it gives me a better hope of continued service beyond whatever length of time I serve Cobden. So now I need to brush up on my Church History, Symbolics (Creeds and Confessions), Church Polity and so on. Some can't be done until the texts/areas are set.

Started reading "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist", by Normal Geisler and Frank Turek. Very good. I'm only up to page 77, but already I want to buy a ton of copies and send them to everyone I know. Whether you're a Christian or not, you should read this book. It will make you think, and perhaps laugh as well (at some of the funny logic we sometimes have).

The weather in Cobden is heating up. At least it's not Brisbane, where you get heat plus humidity. Well, not often like Brisbane :).

Suspend2-wise, I'm plodding along. Slowly working on bug fixes and cleanups, but it's very definitely low in the priorities at the mo, as is Beryl. Rightly so of course - what I'm paid to do has to come first. Which reminds me - must do some Redhat work this week.

Beryl 0.1.2 is nearly here!

It's looking quite good, though there are still some rough edges. I tried to use it for a presentation the other day, and it didn't properly maximise the presentation window, so I had to switch to plain old KDE :(. Oh well, knowing about a problem gets you part way to fixing it.

I've also done some work on fixing bugs in the resize plugin. Quite pleased with the results. Now, if only window stacking worked better...