I’ve so far created a suite of 4 of these mini applications, which allow Facebook users to show off what they’re reading (or listening to, or watching, or playing) and interact with friends in each of those spheres. The apps are called Books, CDs, Video Games, and DVDs, respectively. It would be great if you checked these out and added them to your profile! With close to 35,000 total users so far, it’s possible for me to run a small business based on the apps, which would be fun. I’d love your help.

Just for fun, here’s a screenshot of some Books functionality:

Working on an improv synth solo for So Talk About It at 3am

I have a strong desire to share all our new songs with everyone here, but a few things remain to be worked out. First, I don’t have an “official” CD–David does, and he’s in Africa for a month. Second, I’m not naive enough to think that the mix I have will be final. We usually go through rounds of tweaking, and, while things sound excellent, there’re always one or two minor changes to make. Third, the album has no title. Fourth, the album has no artwork. I’d like all of these things to be present before I unveil everything officially. So just hold tight for now! I’ll probably break down and put one or two up here anyway, since the only reason I feel secure is that I am validated by my peers.

Speaking of being validated by my peers, let’s go on a tangent: those of you who are e4 weblog owners or frequenters might have noticed that I have added trackback capability to the e4 weblogs. Trackbacks are a cool example of the way the web is supposed to work–now, when you write entries, e4 will check out any links you make, and attempt to send a trackback ping to that site. If the site is trackback-enabled, it’ll accept the ping, and people who visit it will see that your entry references the page! Likewise all the weblogs here are now trackback-enabled, so anyone can send pings from Movable Type, WordPress, or wherever. Let’s just hope for no horrible spam!

(For you e4 bloggers, you can play with the trackback preferences at your weblog config page)

Well, I am now officially back in California for a while, so hopefully I’ll have time to write some more reflective posts soon. Ciao!

As the time approached, it became clear that much more work would be required than I thought. Building an online store is pretty rough, particularly when the API is complicated, uses lots of tools, any of which could break making it very hard to debug, and one is given no specifications at all for how it should work or what it should look like or what will even be in it. Moreover, since I don’t have a working PC at the moment, I was unable to test the design for IE as I was going along (and I didn’t want to in any case). I realized one night at about 1am that IE doesn’t support transparent PNG files (picture files), so all the cool little black-and-white auto-generated buttons you see in Firefox and Safari…well those were not-so-cool little black-and-white-and-neon-green buttons in IE. I tried a million hacks to get it to work, but to no avail with PHP-generated image code. And that was about 4 unplanned and unnecessary hours of wasted time.

So here’s the point: as soon as I realized that I would need to spend a lot of time on this, I went in to what I will call “consumed” mode. In other words, I decided that I would eat, drink, and not sleep coding this site until I was done. Of course, along with that decision came the loss of all vestiges of a healthy lifestyle…I was awake from 9 or 10 am until 5 am, sitting at my computer, not eating anything, like a little hunchback gnome typing away at keys. My right hand was and is completely fried–either tendonitis or something else render it a continual mass of dull pain. I switched over a year ago to using my mouse with my left hand, but it hasn’t really helped.

I realized throughout that, in consumed mode, I actually get a lot of stuff done! I mean, I didn’t read, go outside, make or play music, hang out with people, spend time thinking about life or real issues, or do any of the things that makes mine a well-rounded and satisfying existence…but I was a coding fiend. My work efficiency increased tenfold. It occurred to me how it must feel to be one of those people who really focuses on one single thing in life, and it was kind of cool. It made me wonder if that’s not a way I’m supposed to be…you see there’s something about my personality which makes it very easy to enter consumed mode when I first discover something new that I want to create or excel in. A sport, a class, a song, a book, a hobby, a writing project, anything… The initial moments are intense and productive, but then I quickly get bored or realize that it will actually take a lot of work, and I lose interest and move on to other things.

This habit has meant that I have had an extremely wide range of experiences, have tried many new things, and have the gear/paraphernalia for more hobbies/pursuits than anyone I know or have heard of. What it also means is that I tend not to (a) excel at things to the extend that I have the ability, and/or (b) finish projects that I start. On my computer right now are probably failed attempts at at least 5 novels, and twice as many sets of song lyrics. If it doesn’t happen in the first day, it doesn’t seem to happen at all. That’s typically the way my music writing goes–a blast of creativity, and then, if that spark doesn’t carry me through to completion…the song usually never gets fully written and I forget about it.

So, I have been trying to think differently and grow in my creativity by actually setting aside time to work diligently on songs or writings. I’m working on a song now, for instance, where for the first time I sat down with paper and pen, drew out staves, and worked on a melody line in standard musical nutation, over the course of a whole week. It’s giving me a lot of frustrations and when I sit down with a guitar to work on more of it, I’m always tempted to try something else that holds the promise of being a quick project. However, I’m trying to believe that by actually working on this song, it will be better, not worse, for the amount of time I put into it. We shall see.

I’m very wary, of course, about committing too much to one thing (i.e., being in consumed mode all the time). I mean, I very much feel the pain of not being able to say that I am passionate about one and only one thing. In fact, I felt that pain tonight very strongly, as I went climbing with a group of people who are all vastly more committed to the pursuit than I am. I felt like I very much wanted to commit myself to climbing to the same degree, so that I could do the things they were doing and have the ability to climb so many more routes and types of routes than I can now. But, I knew that if I made that decision, I would have to give up so many more things…and I just can’t bring myself to do that.

Ultimately, I’m not sure what is the most healthy for me. Some people are in consumed mode for work all the time, and others for a sport or a hobby. I can’t seem to want to live there for very long. What surprised me most of all, to tell the truth, was that I was able to force myself into it these last few days at all! It must say something about the type of work that I have that, when my paycheck is neither on the line (that I know of) nor overlarge, I’m still willing and able to pull 4 all-nighters in a row for a project. I wouldn’t have thought it possible in general, but especially for that length of time. Now the task is to re-enter life and to try and find a healthy balance. Finding this balance will be more on the forefront of my mind now, however, as I’ll maybe start to think if there any things I should let go in order to excel in other things I love more deeply. Honestly, I think the problem is that I love so many things to such a deep degree that that would be a nonsensical venture. I’ll be thinking about it, though, especially now that I know that spending a lot of time on something actually produces results–it’s an alien concept to my personality.

Recently I’ve taken to a strategy which has been used, to great effect, by almost every software giant in existence. This strategy doesn’t so much solve the workday synchronization problem (as getting up at 4:30 am would, for example), but instead says that, actually, desynchronization is the solution! Namely: around-the-clock development.

This is how it works:

At 6am Eastern, Joe and Pavi get to work at Teleios headquarters. They put in a good 8 hours of work, writing new code and testing code that I’ve written previously. In the course of this writing and testing, they come up with a number of bugs having to do with my web app or with the integration process.

Then, around 12pm Pacific, I stumble out of bed and wander bleary-eyed in my underwear to my computer downstairs, where I check my e-mail and immediately wish I hadn’t. I’m greeted by the results of Teleios’ hard labor the previous day (well, it’s the same calendar day, but I got up so late it’s effectively after their work day), namely a huge list of bugs for me to squash.

So I spend a good 4-5 hours fixing bugs and wondering when it was that I wrote that particular line of code and was I on drugs at the time? About then it’s dinner time, so I’ll do that and hang out with people, play sports or games or talk or whatever. Then around 10pm-12am, I’ll put in another few hours of work, and this is when I code new features, since all the previous part of the day has been spent on fixing old ones.

Sometimes I’ll code (like I did a few days ago) to 3am, which is just about when Joe and Pavi are getting into the office in Florida. Now it’s their turn to be greeted by a bunch of new code which may or may not play nice with their own respective pieces of software!

In this way the proverbial sun never sets on the Teleios workday.

Anyway, the conference call was the result of some chance interactions that several in our community had with Millard (which, incidentally, were the reason I heard about Koinonia, etc…), and the purpose of it was to see if there were any good ways for us to partner with Millard’s new organization, the Fuller Center for Housing. This new company aims to help people who are “too poor” for Habitat to work with.

Some in our community were pretty excited about the prospect of doing work with an organization like this, even before the conference call, and as we listened to Millard share his vision of basic housing for the entire world, it was indeed inspiring. Already there are lots of projects all over the world for the Fullers–more than they can handle, in fact.

We discussed a few next steps for various members of our community, and we will probably try to get together with Millard again soon to talk more. We’re hoping that, at the very least, all of us could go work for a short time on a project somewhere, maybe overseas in Nepal.

Personally, I have no desire to devote myself to hammering nails in Nepal, even if that is a genuine need in the world and even if it is a mandate of Christ to do that sort of thing. Well, that’s not true–I do have a desire for it, just not as great a desire as for other things which I feel have an even stronger hold on my passions and abilities, and my heart. This dream of ours at Teleios, for example, is keeping me very centered in my “calling”, to use a bad Christian word.

Still, something about physically bringing some of the signs of the Kingdom to a part of the world is very attractive, and I think that discipline is all too often overlooked by Americans in particular, and evangelicals especially. So I am glad to be in a community where such disciplines are true loves, and where I can support efforts to those ends with the resources that I have, whether it is friendship or freelance web design or physical action.

So I’m not sure what is going to happen with this; who knows, maybe in a year a few of my friends will be moving to Sri Lanka to head up housing projects there! For me, I’m excited to see what will happen.

**What follows is a rather uninteresting account of some nerd stuff**

For instance, here I am on a Sunday night in Wisconsin about to go to my grandmother’s 80th birthday. I’ve spent the past few weeks getting this fun server back into shape after it practically exploded with Plesk/PHP5/Apache/MySQL conflicts and incompatibilities.

The kind people at [insert our hosting provider’s name here], where we host, went back and forth, fixing one problem and breaking something else in the meantime, to the extent that I resorted to several ultimatums demanding a working server or I’d take my business elsewhere, etc…

Well, a week or so ago, things finally settled down, PHP started working (which is important, because it is what is running the scripts that make up this application), MySQL stopped not working (which is also important, because it is the database server which holds all the information in this web application), and the little server ecosystem was more or less at peace. So I’d gone back to something I actually know a little about, which is coding, glad that my ignorance at web server administration had ceased being put to the test.

But like I said, here I am on a Sunday night in Wisconsin, and all of a sudden I get an IM from Faith: “Uh, what happened to the server?”. Whoops–all PHP scripts are now returning an error 52, which is a “no data” error. I take a look at Apache’s error logs, and all I see is a bunch of “segmented execution fault” thread errors. I have no idea what this means, because these aren’t sensible web-server errors, but instead just signify that some binary somewhere blew up somehow.

To make things really awesome, my whole team is actually at work on this Sunday night, because tomorrow is a Big Day. It’s one of those Days where the work we are doing actually needs to work, behave, not have bugs, integrate well, and so forth. I can’t say exactly why it’s a Big Day, but it is. And now, my simple little web application isn’t working. It wouldn’t be so bad only from one perspective it’s really the glue that holds a lot of the online functionality for Teleios courses together. Whoops!

So we’re at T-minus some small number of hours, and my server blows up. I’m not too excited about my chances of getting actual tech support anytime soon, since the last time I had a problem it took two weeks to get it worked out. So I called our hosting company and asked about getting a new server ASAP, one with all the pieces working from the factory, instead of one that I hacked for a while then cried for help on, then got help that actually blew more stuff up, and so on. They said it was a no-go, as was our option for an OS reload and reinstall tonight, because, “I don’t even know if there are any guys that do OS reloads back there right now”.

Needless to say, we’re experiencing some major frustrations, as lots of testing needs to be done tonight and there’s no server to test on. So I plead with the tech support guy I’ve got on the phone, and he promises to take a look at things himself and fix it if he could. Meanwhile our backup plan is to hack together an in-house server for the Big Event and get a copy of this application installed there. Only thing is, I’ve never installed the application somewhere else, databases aren’t set up, data is not backed up, and… I can’t even have access to the in-house server because it’s…in-house! Meaning, behind a firewall in Orlando, and I’m in the middle of Dairyland, getting on a plane in a few hours where I won’t even have internet.

So I’m trying to remember how exactly to get this app running on a server, what all the parts are, how to set up the database, and kicking myself for not writing a nice little delivery script which would just install on command anywhere you wanted. I’m writing Joe a very detailed set of instructions on how to set all these things up, and hoping they’re detailed enough to get things right the first time, because if something goes wrong, well, I’m on a plane, and I can’t help.

Then, when everything seems most desperate, I get word from the tech support guys that they fixed the problem! They described it in detail to me, and I realized it’s something that I should have known how to fix myself (just a configuration file misload for apache), but couldn’t troubleshoot because I’m not that smart at linuxy stuff yet. I’d really like to be, so that I could actually handle some of these problems myself, but alas, I am not.

The story has a good ending, and has taught me some very valuable lessons about server administration; most importantly, don’t let them get screwed up. Because if you do that and try to fix them, you’ll probably break things worse. And then it’s all over!