Every Student

Political Idolatry?

From this blog:

Something I find a little distressing in America is that the Christians are so often relying on POLITICS to accomplish SPIRITUAL results. Thus they ally themselves fervently with one particular party and treat it like "God has won" if that party wins - and "God has lost" if it doesn't. I almost see this as a kind of BLINDNESS.

Agree?

Economic historian and Nobel Laureate Robert Fogel considers statistics like these and concludes:

"Indeed, we have become so rich that we are approaching saturation in the consumption not only of necessities, but also of goods recently thought to be luxuries...Virtually everyone who is old enough and well enough to drive a car has one. In the case of television, there are 0.8 sets per person (2.2 per household)...The level of saturation for many consumer durables is so high that even the poorest fifth of households are well endowed with them."

http://www.techcentralstation.com/071504B.html

Simple mail merges in Ruby

module Mergeable
  def merge(text)
    q = %(")
    s = %(\\)
    text = text.dup
    text.gsub!('#{', '#{self.')
    
    #sanitize
    text.gsub!(/#\{([^}]*)([^}\w\.])([^}]*)\}/, '')
    
    text.gsub!(q, s+q)
    eval(q + text + q)
  end
end

require 'ostruct'

# Could be an ActiveRecord Model instead

class MergeStruct < OpenStruct 

  include Mergeable

end

person = MergeStruct.new({"first_name" => "Kyle", "last_name" => "Maxwell"})

letter = '

Subject: Self-affirmation

Dear #{first_name},

You are cool.

  

Sincerely,

#{first_name} #{last_name}'.strip

puts person.merge(letter)

Where did form_remote_upload go?

Well, it may not be completely intuitive by the name, but the official upload_progress plugin contains the functionality of form_remote_upload (that is, AJAX file uploads). Check it out at:

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/plugins/upload_progress/

Rails -- Textmate "IDE"

Here's the script I use to start up my Rails editing environment. It assumes you are in the RAILS_ROOT folder, and you have textmate and mongrel.


kyle:~ kyle$ cat ~/bin/s
#!/bin/sh
killall ruby
mongrel_rails start -d
sleep 1
open http://localhost:3000/
sleep 1
mate .


Interview with Mat Weiss

Mat is the leader of my ministry team. I asked him a few questions over email:

How big is the team I will be a part of?

About 35.

What is the team purpose/mission statement?

We lead technology and media for the whole campus ministry. As the web (and culture) changes, it's becoming more media rich. You no longer need just old school programmers and admins to build things anymore. You need to integrate media elements. You can imagine how essential this is when your focus is students. So we are to take things to the next level. Putting a bible study on a website. That's so yesterday. Now we need to leverage things like Facebook [A social-networking site where the average college student spends 20 minutes per day].

RailsCron Deprecation

Ok, so here's the deal. RailsCron is still available, but in the not_supported folder of my svn.

Why?

1. RailsCron is threaded, which causes all kinds of nightmares when Rails isn't threadsafe.
2. All of RailsCron's functionality is available in BackgroundRb (which is threaded too, ymmv).
3. RailsCron's daemonization isn't terribly Capistrano-friendly
4. I wrote daemon_generator, which allows you to easily incorporate your own daemons into Rails. It's minimal, and it's what I actually use. Focusing on the daemons, without coupling messaging and database dependence, is the way to go for me.

If you want bare-bones, stable, and functional, use daemon_generator. If you want messaging and features, use backgroundRb. I don't see value in RailsCron anymore.

About my ministry

I work for Campus Crusade for Christ, as a software engineer.

The campus ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ is a network of vibrant, growing movements on over one thousand campuses in the United States and beyond. Proven and diverse outreach strategies expose millions of students to the gospel each year.

As part of the Information and Technology Team, I help provide tools to help make the six thousand full-time staff more effective. Examples of past technology initiatives include:

- Contact and donor management software that streamlines the support-raising process for thousands of missionaries (not just Campus Crusade) worldwide.
- Online signup management for all of the short and mid-term missions trips (over 100 trips each year), and conferences.

One of our current dreams is for social networking websites that link a movement’s small groups (bible studies, ministry teams) together, and provide a unified resource for curriculum, events, etc. We can then share this with other ministries and churches.

Take a look at our concept.

I’m currently trusting God to raise up a team of people, who will help make my participation in this amazing ministry possible.

If God is leading you to learn more, please contact me! My email is kyle.maxwell@uscm.org, or you can call me at (619) 316-3999.

Of course, you can also leave a message using the comments form below. I check back often (and remove from public view any contact info you may post)

God bless!!

Enterprise Ruby is....

Finish the sentence in the comments. I'll start with " ... 500+ line Capistrano recipes."

A thought by Mark Twain

A man can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't legally be a Christian and a patriot--except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart. The spirit of Christianity proclaims the brotherhood of the race and the meaning of that strong word has not been left to guesswork, but made tremendously definite- the Christian must forgive his brother man all crimes he can imagine and commit, and all insults he can conceive and utter- forgive these injuries how many times?--seventy times seven--another way of saying there shall be no limit to this forgiveness. That is the spirit and the law of Christianity. Well--Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult. Word it as softly as you please, the spirit of patriotism is the spirit of the dog and wolf. The moment there is a misunderstanding about a boundary line or a hamper of fish or some other squalid matter, see patriotism rise, and hear him split the universe with is war-whoop. The spirit of patriotism being in its nature jealous and selfish, is just in man's line, it comes natural to him- he can live up to all its requirements to the letter; but the spirit of Christianity is not in its entirety possible to him.

The prayers concealed in what I have been saying is, not that patriotism should cease and not that the talk about universal brotherhood should cease, but that the incongruous firm be dissolved and each limb of it be required to transact business by itself, for the future.

- Mark Twain