The Changelog

Big news over here: earlier this week, our first baby was born: Jacob Simon Goerzen! He weighed in at 8 lbs, 12 oz and is doing well.

Terah was in labor most of the day, but eventually the doctor determined he was too big, so was delivered by C-section. Terah is still sore from all that, but otherwise is doing well, too. And of course we're both trying to catch up on sleep. (Not that we really expect to be able to...)

It's already been so wonderful to have him here. He already has a personality in some ways, and just is wonderful to be around. We've had a number of visitors, but the one that was extra special was when my 91-year-old grandmother stopped by and held him for awhile. Terah managed to get a photo of Jacob, me, my mom, and grandma -- 4 generations.

We've got a lot to tell, and I'm sure you'll be seeing more from both Terah and me in the next couple of days. But to start you off, I've got the first 5 pictures online already.

Here's one of the earliest pictures of him. This one was in the operating room, just a couple of minutes after he was born. The nurses had done their inital check, and gave him to me. I took him over by Terah so she could look (the doctors were still finishing up the operation). One of the people in the OR took the camera and got this picture:



Make sure to click here for the rest of the pictures in this set.

Debian folks -- do you see anything striking about Terah's gown in the photo of her holding Jacob? Something oddly familiar, perhaps? Something that my brother recognized instantly -- and burst out laughing -- when we asked him if he "noticed anything special" about the gown? More on that later...

Sorry, Cliff, for not posting sooner. Hopefully no more bait will be necessary...

There are a lot of beautiful fall colors that will be showing up in forests around the world shortly.

But here in Kansas, we get a little jump on the colors because this is sunflower season.

If you drive around Kansas this time of year (roughly August and September), you'll see sunflowers all over the place. The wild sunflowers thrive anywhere there's nobody to plow them under or mow them down. If you pick the right country road, you can drive along and see what looks like a yellow wall in the distance. As you get closer, you realize that you're seeing sunflowers growing along a small stream or creek, though they've completely hidden it.

Although I grew up here, I had never really paid attention to the sunflowers. Back in 2002, as we were moving to Kansas from Indiana, Terah noticed the wild sunflowers. She'd never seen wild sunflowers and has really enjoyed them ever since (and so have I).

So, here are some sunflower photos, for those of you that have never had the chance to travel some of the back roads of Kansas.

First we start with a small bunch of wild sunflowers:



This small patch is growing in the ditch by our farm (our house is in that clump of trees in the background). These sunflowers are pretty young, so they aren't very tall yet. Also, there's a butterly fluttering around in that photo.

Most of the wild sunflowers get much taller than these. They seem to usually grow to about 5 to 7 feet (1.5 - 2.1m) tall. Here's a taller patch, about 1/2 mile away from the first one:



Neither of these two example photos show a very "deep" view of a group of sunflowers, because they are so dense that it's hard to really see what the individual plants look like in such a photo.

But here's a photo of a sunflower field:



These sunflowers don't grow as tall as their wild cousins, but their flower heads are quite a bit larger. This type of sunflower can be found many places. Wild sunflowers like we have here can be found in different places, too, but I've never seen them so common as here in Kansas.

Well,it's just a few days until our baby is born! We're starting to get excited. And things are pretty busy, too -- so that explains why I haven't had many blog posts lately.

Well, I got my new MacBook Pro 15" in yesterday. I'll write something about that shortly. The main OS for this machine is not Mac OS X, though, but Debian.

I decided that, being a laptop, I would like to run dm-crypt on here. Much to my delight, the etch installers support dm-crypt out of the box.

Not only that, but they supported this setup out of the box, too:

• Two partitions for Debian -- one for /boot, everything else on the second one


• The second partition is completely encrypted


• Inside the encrypted container is an LVM physical volume


• Inside the LVM physical volume are logical volumes for /, /home, /usr, /var, and swap


• XFS is used for each filesystem

Not only that, but it set up proper boot sequence for all of this out of the box, too.

So I turn on the unit, enter the password for the encrypted partition, and then the system continues booting.

Nice. Very nice.

Kudos to the debian-installer and initramfs teams.

Well, it's been awhile since I've posted photos of our renovation project. We've been very busy, and I'll write about that sometime soon, too.

But anyway, I've now posted photos of weeks 10 - 12 of the renovation.

Some of the highlights include: new windows, a new roof, two new staircases, three old oil heaters removed from the attic (some still with oil in them), and a little joking around from the workers.

Click above to see all of the photos.

Here are two samples from this set. First, how the house looks from the oustide now:



And this one:



Someone found that old commode from the attic. They put it on the dirt pile, and put a bucket under it for good measure.

Nobody actually used it.

That we know of.

Today on Slashdot, there is a story and interesting discussion about an article entitled Consumer electronics ate my child's imagination.

The main point of the article is that children today are spending a lot of time in front of the TV and playing videogames. As a result, they are less able to reason about the world, and even have a higher rate of depression. Apparently children today average about 2-3 years behind children from just 15 years ago on cognitive tests.

The Slashdot discussion was (surprise!) interesting as well. One point raised was that the entire notion of childhood is fairly modern concept since most children had to work as soon as they were able up until modern times.

This is something that Terah and I have been thinking about already. Terah was shopping for high chairs one day, and was reading reviews online at Amazon. We were both shocked that some chairs were being panned in the reviews because children "got uncomfortable after more than 2 or 3 hours in the chair". Huh?? After reading some more reviews, it seems that people are using high chairs as a place to just plonk down kids for a few hours while the parents are trying to get work done around the house. I can't imagine any high chair being a good place to put a kid for hours. Some parents also complained that the kids could get out of the chair if left unattended for awhile (which brings up a whole LOT of questions).

Then of course, there are plenty of parents that use the TV (or PlayStation or handheld videogames) as a cheap babysitter.

Terah and I have talked about this already, and though we don't have any sort of detailed parenting plan, we certainly do NOT want to be that kind of parents. Some people react by saying, "oh sure, you may say that now, but once you have the kids, you'll change your tune." Yes, that's right, some parents don't even try, and what's more, believe that it's impossible to treat children any other way.

We know plenty of parents that are successfully raising children without buying them hundreds of beeping electronic toys, using the TV (or high chair) as a babysitter, etc. We know it's possible and that's what we're going to aim for, too.

There are a lot of places to buy stuff from online. Two favorites are cat5ecablguy and B&H Photo & Video.

First, cat5ecableguy. Well, despite the name, he sells cat3, cat5e, cat6, cable -- both patch cables and bulk -- as well as other things like speaker wire, jacks, coaxial cable, etc. He's got quality products and almost always the cheapest around. It's not unusual to see him selling things at about half the normal price.

I bought a lot of stuff from cat5ecableguy.com when we remodeled one room in our current house -- bulk cable, keystone jacks, and keystone plates, mostly. We also buy from him at work -- mostly patch cables there. He has prompt shipping and is great to work with. He's even been helping me track down black CAT6 keystone jacks for our remodel project.

Second, B&H Photo. It seems like if you use a service like shopping.com or froogle to find good prices on things like cameras, TVs, etc., that there are a whole bunch of companies that advertise good prices but then call you to "confirm" an order, only to use high-pressure tactics to sell you way overpriced accessories. Some of them even go so far as to cancel orders for people that don't purchase the accessories. Others just have bad prices or sell "grey market" merchandise (stuff intended for a non-US market that doesn't have a valid US warranty) without mentioning it.

This is not B&H. B&H has a bunch of high-quality stuff, good prices (often not the absolute lowest, but certainly among the lowest, and usually the lowest trustworthy store), and good service. They have some large print catalogs you can request as well.

I was surprised to see recently that they've added pro audio to their lineup, so when I got a digitial audio recorder, I got it from them. It was a $500 item or so. They called me to confirm the order -- on a *Sunday* morning no less -- but with them, that really is all it is. "Did you place an order for xyz from us?" "Yes." "OK, I've released it for shipping. Do you have any questions for us?" "No." "OK, thanks for using B&H."

I'm not quite sure why they call to confirm some orders, but I think it's a fraud protection measure.

So anyway, I haven't been paid to write these comments, and neither place even knows I'm doing this. I just wanted to pass along my experiences with two very nice, clueful, and honest retailers.

Over on Terah's blog, she has a virtual baby shower going on. The idea:

"Leave a comment with a virtual gift. Your gift can be advice, a link to something that I should be registered for, a reflective thought, something you've learned from your own baby experiences, or whatever other creative thing that you can think of."

So if you'd like, head on over to her site and leave a comment.

Yesterday, I posted an 18-line solution to Lars' language problem. One problem with it was that it was not very memory-efficient (or time-efficient, for that matter). In other words, it was optimized for elegance.

Here is a 22-line solution that is much more memory-efficient and works well with his "huge" test case. Note to Planet readers: Planet seems to corrupt code examples at times; click on the original story to see the correct code.

import System.Environment
import Data.List
import Data.Char
import qualified Data.Map as Map

custwords = filter (/= "") . lines . map (conv . toLower)
    where iswordchar x = isAlphaNum x && isAscii x
          conv x = if iswordchar x then x else '\n'

wordfreq inp = Map.toList $ foldl' updmap (Map.empty::Map.Map String Int) inp
    where updmap nm word = case Map.lookup word nm of
                             Nothing -> Map.insert word 1 nm
                             Just x -> (Map.insert word $! x + 1) nm

freqsort (w1, c1) (w2, c2) = if c1 == c2
                                 then compare w1 w2
                                 else compare c2 c1

showit (word, count) = show count ++ " " ++ word
main = do args <- getArgs
          interact $ unlines . map showit . take (read . head $ args) .
                     sortBy freqsort . wordfreq . custwords

The main change from the previous example to this one is using a Map to keep track of the frequency of each word.

Thanks to a little glitch in planet, one of Lars' posts from 2004 came to my attention. In it, he proposes a test for language benchmarking:

Read text from the standard input and count the number of times each word occurs. Convert letters to lower case. Order the words according to frequency, words with the same frequency should be ordered in ascending lexicographic order according to character code. Print out the top N words, where N is a decimal number given on the command line. Each output line must contain the count, a space, and the word (in lower case), and end in an ASCII LINE FEED character. Output must contain exactly N such output lines and no other output lines.

A word contains only ASCII letters A through Z and a through z (convert upper case to lower case) and ASCII digits 0 through 9 and is not empty. All other characters separate words and are ignored except to notice word boundaries. Word boundaries only occur at the beginning and end of the file and at non-word characters. You may not assume a maximum length for the word, line, or input file.

He provides a tarball with sample implementations in C, Python, and Shell.

His C code is 183 lines long, Python 57, and Shell 11. The specs for this test seem particularly suited for shell.

I wrote a version in Haskell, commented and formatted approximately the same as his Python version, but using an algorithm more like the shell version. It comes in at 18 lines. Here it is:

import System.Environment
import Data.List
import Data.Char

custwords = filter (/= "") . lines . map (conv . toLower)
    where iswordchar x = isAlphaNum x && isAscii x
          conv x = if iswordchar x then x else '\n'

wordfreq = map (\x -> (head x, length x)) . group . sort

freqsort (w1, c1) (w2, c2) = if c1 == c2
                                 then compare w1 w2
                                 else compare c2 c1

showit (word, count) = show count ++ " " ++ word
main = do args <- getArgs
          interact $ unlines . map showit . take (read . head $ args) .
                     sortBy freqsort . wordfreq . custwords

Taking a look at this, one thing that might strike you is the function composition in main. This takes the output from one function and feeds it into the next -- and the Haskell syntactic sugar for this makes it look a lot like pipes in the shell version. The interact call takes, as a parameter, a function that takes a string and returns a string. interact supplies stdin as the input and prints the output to stdout. Note that, since Haskell is lazily, this does not mean buffering up the entire input or output -- it is read and written on demand.

The rest of the functions are also standard in Haskell, and you can find them in the index to the library reference if you want to learn more.

I understand and agree that short code doesn't necessarily mean good code, but I think that Haskell provides a very elegant and expressive solution to many problems -- one that also happens to be remarkably concise.

Updated 9/4: Changed isLower to isAlphaNum to fix a bug, and removed unnecessary Data.Map import