Here is Wisdom

Today I heard this on Key Life, and thought it was worth sharing and remembering:

No matter how rich or famous you may become, the number of people who come to your funeral will still depend on the weather.
--Unknown

Cole, Take 2

Here's a closer-up shot of the new boy in town.

Bruning, Nebraska: Hot Air Ballooning Hotbed

Since I've begun to crew for a balloon-pilot colleague, I've become interested in this sport. I've been doing a little research. So, having grown up in southeast Nebraska, about 10 miles from Bruning, I was surprised to learn of a significant event that occurred there in 1960. The equipment used in modern hot air ballooning was first demonstrated outside Bruning by Ed Yost (who coincidentally died just a few weeks ago [No! Not in a balloon wreck!].) He was the first to use an airborne heater to keep the balloon aloft.

Of course, hot air ballooning had been around for almost 200 years at that point. The advent of a portable mechanism to keep the air hot allowed the pilot to maneuver in the vertical plane, and the sport received a shot in the arm. Currently there are, according to My Favorite Site in the World, 7500 balloons in the US.

I found it somewhat ironic that Southeast Nebraska would be involved in the revival of a sport which, as far as I know, has almost no participation in that part of the world. I don't recall ever seeing a hot air balloon as a kid. Someone, please correct me if I'm wrong about the dearth of ballooning in SE Nebr.

Ahh...Bruning. I have fond memories of Pastor Thomas Damrow, who shepherded the flock Trinity Lutheran Church in Bruning during my childhood there. God bless you, if you're out there, Pastor.

Chomsky Refuted?

While leafing through the Plain Dealer this morning, I came across an unusual spot. Seems there's a tribe of 350 or so in Brazil with an actual "primitive" language. As a student of linguistics, I have long accepted the claim that no language is primitive, that is, any thought can be expressed in any language. Building from these assumptions, smart folks like Noam Chomsky have tried to distill what the common denominators are to all human languages: Which features of human language are "hard-wired" in our brains from birth? What allows us to acquire language and use it to express abstract thought? They have claimed for several decades that certain universals are found in every human language, or shall we say, almost every human language?

The language of the Pirahã tribe of Brazil reportedly lacks some of the "universal" constructs we'd expect to see in a language. According to Der Spiegel, one of these missing constructs is recursion. In English recursion is rendered using subordinate clauses. For example: "This is the dog that bit the man who came to our door." (Relative pronouns underlined, subordinate clauses in italics.) Clauses modify and describe each other, so in the end the full meaning of the discourse is dependent upon its context.

The chief expert on the Pirahã language today is Daniel Everett, who not surprisingly has been working among the tribe as a Bible translator. It may be that his analysis is incorrect or incomplete. Others apparently have been dispatched to test his claims. The Plain Dealer article (sorry, no link available as of this writing) mentioned that current traditionalists had regarded Everett's claims as "putative" and insufficient to revolutionize the study of human language. I hope that Everett is not being dismissed as a lightweight because of his work as a Bible translator.

In the end it may be that the Pirahã language will serve to advance the claims of the thought-depends-on-language school--those who claim, "You cannot conceive in your mind what you cannot find words for." I don't know. Something in my world view seems to reject this idea...e.g. God, Trinity, infinity. But I must admit I could stand to learn from those who've dedicated much effort in the field.

Coleman Steven

My, how our family has grown! We are proud to announce the birth of Coleman Steven on June 12, 2007. Here's the first official picture of "the boys." Praise the Lord for his blessings!

Which Church Father are You?

As for me, the results are in...

You’re St. Melito of Sardis! You have a great love of history and liturgy. You’re attached to the traditions of the ancients, yet you recognize that the old world — great as it was — is passing away. You are loyal to the customs of your family, though you do not hesitate to call family members to account for their sins. Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!

Harrison Hunting Easter Eggs

This is Harrison crawling around the room with his broken leg. :-( hunting easter eggs. He broke it on Tuesday, we think it was when he was getting out of a toy car. Anyway, he'll have the cast for a 3 weeks. It doesn't slow him down much as you can see. He's definitely an inspiration to me.

Sending text and html email with Java

Here's a useful snippet for sending HTML formatted messages with the JavaMail API. One problem that I see out there is that people like nicely formatted HTML messages, but they don't often include a text-only part as well. This makes the message inaccessible to certain mail clients. This Mailer class shows an example of what I consider to be best practice in this arena.

Enjoy!



// $Header$
// $Name$
package com.sherwin.ordering.util;

import java.util.Date;
import java.util.Properties;

import javax.mail.Address;
import javax.mail.Message;
import javax.mail.Session;
import javax.mail.Transport;
import javax.mail.internet.InternetAddress;
import javax.mail.internet.MimeBodyPart;
import javax.mail.internet.MimeMessage;
import javax.mail.internet.MimeMultipart;

public class Mailer {

/**
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

if (args.length <>
throw new IllegalArgumentException("2 arguments required");
}

String email1 = args[0];
String email2 = args[1];

Properties mailProperties = new Properties();
mailProperties.setProperty("protocol", "smtp");
mailProperties.setProperty("type", "transport");
mailProperties.setProperty("class", "com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPTransport");
mailProperties.setProperty("mail.smtp.host",
System.getProperty("mail.smtp.host", // say on cmd line: -Dmail.smtp.host=xxx.yyy.zzz
"smtp.mycompany.com" // default if above not present
));

// setup the sending "session"
Session session = Session.getInstance(mailProperties, null);

String htmlString = "<html><body>This has <i>HTML</i> in it. google.</body></html>";
String txtString = "Hi text";

Address[] recipients = {
new InternetAddress(email1, "Smitty"),
new InternetAddress(email2)
};

// Assemble a MIME message
Message msg = new MimeMessage(session);
msg.addRecipients(Message.RecipientType.TO, recipients);
msg.setFrom(new InternetAddress("do-not-reply@mycompany.com", "My Company, Inc."));
msg.setSubject("Thanks for contacting us");
msg.setSentDate(new Date());
msg.setHeader("X-Mailer", "MyMailer $Name$");

MimeMultipart mp = new MimeMultipart("alternative");

MimeBodyPart txtPart = new MimeBodyPart();
txtPart.setText(txtString);

MimeBodyPart htmlPart = new MimeBodyPart();
htmlPart.setContent(htmlString, "text/html");

// it's probably important to have the txt part added first
// for the sake of less capable clients
mp.addBodyPart(txtPart);
mp.addBodyPart(htmlPart);
msg.setContent(mp);

Transport.send(msg);
}
}

Hierarchies in RDBMS

Here's one I've been knocking around while: how do you most effectively model an infinite-depth hierarchical structure in a relational database like PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.?

A couple of choices come to mind:
1. a table with a field to contain the key value of its parent record
2. a table with a field containing a delimited value, like a filesystem pathname
3. A "link" table to map parent and child record IDs from the "data" table. This has the added capability of a record with multiple ancestors.

It seems that options 1 & 2 are similar, the main difference being 3 supports multiple ancestors. This could be extra confusing if you don't need this capability. Finding all children of a parent would difficult to do, and I think impossible with SQL alone--some sort of iteration or recursion logic would need to be written, and it is likely to be very slow with large datasets--you can index the keys to find records quickly, but you have to query the index many times.

Option 3 would support speedy lookups, but reorganizing the structure would be messy, especially for large datasets.

Is there a way to get the best of both worlds? How can lookups be quick and re-orgs also?

Someone must have an answer out there...

Babyface

This is the man-cub in his high chair, evidently in a good mood. Love those baby blues. 

Earworm: Poulenc Gloria

Various parts of this piece are floating around in my head. This morning, I was regaling my wife and child with

Qui tollis pecata mundi

DO I LIKE: Yes, very much. It's really Grown on me.
WHY: Obviously, since we've been singing it all week with COC. We had our first performance last night.

Happy nine-month-birthday, Harrison!

Earworm: Edmund Fitzgerald

Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior (Gitchi Gumi.) Consequently the Gordon Lightfoot song was discussed yesterday on NPR. Residues of it were in my consuciousness this morning. It seems odd that as I write this I am hard pressed to recall the words or melody.

DO I LIKE? Don't really know it. Not even sure about the title. Seems a little beany for my tastes, though.

Earworms

It seems most mornings I have a song stuck in my head right as I wake. I thought that if I blogged it, a useful pattern may emerge. Or not. More to come...

Earworm: Beethoven's Ninth

This morning, I kept thinking

Seid entschlungen Millionen diesen Küß der ganzen Welt.

DO I LIKE? So-so. It's grown on me. It's stirring, but not my favorite of his symphonies.

WHY? No clue. Maybe b/c of COC reh last nite, but we reh nothing like that.

What did I learn today?

In today's edition of, "What did I learn today?" we explore the issue of etiquette.

I stood today waiting for the walk signal at a busy intersection downtown. When the signal changed, a car lerched forward as if to cross in front of me, then stopped. I walked. After I had passed the front of the car, the driver honked at me, moved her cell phone's handset, and apparently uttered some unitelligible oathes regarding my person. I looked to a passing fellow pedestrian as if to silently plead my case. We mutually shrugged shoulders and kept going.

What did I learn today?
I learned that "Even when you do the right thing, there's always someone who will find a reason to be pissed at you.

Erie Sunset

We got there just in time, so I whipped out the Treo 650 to grab this shot.

the day has finally come

when asked to select year of birth on a webpage today, mine was one further than was visible on the screen (without scrolling). and i thought the big 3-0 was significant.