Dude, gotta love sequential versus parallel processing. Completely amazing!

Samuel and I have a blast together with Photo Booth on my iMac:

Yes, this speaks to the geek in me, but it’s also a fun fusion of video games and music (and techno, at that, ha!) Enjoy.

Or, read the original story.

For those of you who grew up with a Nintendo, you’ve got to watch the following—make sure and watch the entire thing!

This will have no interest to many of our readers, but I couldn’t resist writing this. Perhaps I will find it useful later.

As many of you may know, I finally made the “switch” and got myself a shiny new MacBook Pro. I love it. I think it’s a solid-piece of hardware with a pretty solid operating system. So now, on a daily basis, I use Mac OS X at home on the MacBook Pro, Kubuntu Linux 6.10 on my home server, and Microsoft Windows XP on my computer at work. I’m having the fun experience of discovering all the quirks on all three operating systems.

Throughout using the various operating systems, I found a program for Linux that lets me use remote file systems as if they were locally mapped on my computer (called sshfs, using the FUSE framework). This is a totally-awesome program for web development, as it allows me to have a locally-mapped folder that is actually a remote folder. Thus, I can edit and save all of my website-related files from the comfort of my Linux computer, using editors that are locally installed and not resorting to shell editors such as pico/nano or emacs (although I love emacs, even though I’m not knowledgeable of all its whistles and bells).

Most web development programs, such as Dreamweaver, rely on pulling down a copy of the website to your local computer, designing/developing the pages on your local computer, and then pushing them back up to the website. This is fine, but you have to worry about synchronization issues. They also often use slower and insecure protocols like FTP. I now don’t have to worry about those issues since I maintain a separate development server from the production servers, and I do all my editing/testing on a development server specifically set up to be a development server (instead of running a LAMP/MAMP/WAMP installation, for instance).

When I “moved” to Mac OS X, I got excited because underneath the glitz and glimmer it runs FreeBSD, a Unix variant. Linux and Unix, of course, have some shared history, and there was a FreeBSD port of sshfs. Unfortunately, however, it didn’t work on OS X. This was bad news to me since I had gotten used to working with sshfs and having my productivity soar.

Just today, Google announced a port of the underlying framework for sshfs (called FUSE, recall) for Mac OS X. Man, was I excited! I went and downloaded all the source and followed the very tedious instructions for building the silly thing, but in the end, it worked like a charm. This is great news and I plan on following the thread of development closely, as most of the commands only work in the console and are not by any means bug-free. But it does provide a workable solution to a problem that I had before. Thanks, Google!

If any one is still reading by this point, I’m amazed and thankful. Thanks to the geeks in the crowd (I think I counted one, maybe two) and happy coding/developing/etc.!

We decided to have some fun today and went to the big computer store to drool over the newest, latest and greatest Macs. In particular, we were looking at the MacBook Pro (since they didn’t have any Mac Pros available), and they are very sweet machines. They have this fun feature, though, that we didn’t really know about until today: a built in iSight camera. So, basically, instead of having to attach an otherwise clunky webcam to your computer, all the new Mac laptops come standard with it built in.

Now, there’s an additional piece of software on there called PhotoBooth, which is basically a simple webcam picture-snapper. It has some fun effects, though, including “xray”, “comic book”, and more. Of particular interest to us was “dent” and “bulge.” See which one you like best. (Even Samuel got involved!)

Wow, this is the summer for celebrations. We have a bunch of friends getting married (six, to be exact), and all we can say is, “It’s about stinkin’ time!” Haha. We highly recommend marriage around these parts.

Also, our dear friends Tim and Jeni have been accepted by the IMB to serve the Lord in the Middle East. It’s something they’ve looked forward to for years, and now it’s time to go! So exciting.

Another fun thing to look forward to is our trip to New York, visiting our friends the Dunns on their farm… in the middle of Amish country. We can’t wait, we have missed them so much since they moved away! We may even swing over to Rhode Island for a day, we’ll see.

Speaking of, we just got the good news that my cousin Mandy is expecting her first child. How awesome to start families together. I’ve aways loved that me and my cousins were so close in age!

Well, God is good, and His blessings abundant. Life is grand.

“Oh no, not the brothers’ Horlbeck!” shouted Randall as we both teamed up against him. In all, Scott and I pretty much cleaned up the competition Saturday night. Yup, Tim, Scott, Randall, Mark E., and Mark’s brother Noah and his wife Nicole all came over and played Halo 2 for about five hours. We had quite the good time playing all different types of variations of the game (ranging from straight-up “slayer” to playing team games of capture-the-flag) on three different TVs.

I do have a word of rebuke, though, for Tim’s wife. It all began with an email I received from Tim early last week when I announced the Halo “party”:

No thanks. I am learning from my very wise wife that killing is wrong. I don't think I'll be playing halo ever again.
Tim

Assuredly this was not from the Tim I knew! Later that same afternoon, I received the following:

It has just come to my attention that somebody very close to me, has impersonated me in a very deceitful way! That person wrongfully expressed a sorrow and disdain for killing on my behalf! May this not be! In fact, Killing in Halo 2 is one of life's greatest and most simple pleasures! Needless to say, the impersonator has been severely chastised, and/or locked in a closet! Therefore, disregard the past correspondence, and bring on the Halo Party!

Ah yes, this was my true friend. And we celebrated heartily on Saturday night. Halo was the perfect way to end the day.

You see, the day started off real early with some fertilizer for the lawn. It’s about that time here in the good ol’ Land of Enchantment. In fact, I mowed the lawn Thursday night to prepare for today. Unfortunately, I didn’t exactly prepare the way I wanted to–although I prepared the grass for fertilizer, I accidentally broke a sprinkler head while mowing. And it didn’t just pop off, either–it actually broke the PVC pipe in the ground.

So after fertilizing the lawn, Tim and I took to the task of digging up the pipe (being ever so careful with the patch of grass), unscrewing the pipe, and going to the Depot to find a replacement (who knew there were so many different types of sprinkler-heads). A sprinkler-head, pipe, and several other tools later (not to fix the sprinkler, mind you, but just…you know, tools and stuff), we got back home and fixed everything right up, good as new. This homeowner is learning new things everyday!

My next project is going to be to do some network wiring in the house. I want to run some Ethernet cabling throughout my office and our other bedroom to alleviate the need for cables to run along the floor. I’ve never done it before but it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

—

Renee’s part:
While the guys were playing Halo at their nerd-fest (keep in mind, girls, these are the cutest nerds around), I had a girls’ day out with Jeni! We went to this great quilt store and signed up for some beginning quilting classes. My two sewing projects this summer are to make some crib bedding for the baby and a big… quilt. Cool, cool, very cool, as Scott would say!

Then we had a wonderful meal at Olive Garden, where Jeni was a slave to her alfredo sauce. Good times.

We’ve interviewed two people to take over my position at work, and that has been strange, imagining myself not coming to work at the office everyday, but I’m looking forward to the joy that’s coming! In the meantime, I’m realizing that the days are going by quickly, and I’m really excited to go home in July to see my family for Mary’s wedding. God’s country–there ain’t no place like it!