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Tim Booher

Personal Projects & Interests

David’s Room

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As you can see here, the room that David was going to move into had significant problems. There is no insulation inside our brick and block constructed walls, and there’s a thin layer of plaster on the surface that causes some excessive flaking when a nail pops out. When we tried to paint David’s room, we were confronted with the fact that most of our new paint would fall off of the wall which was severely flaking in several places. In particular, the damage was worst on the wall that touched the external surface, where the temperature gradient was the highest.

So about a week before David was born, we found out we had to do a bit more than your standard normal paint job, and to tackle this one quickly. The first thing we did was to scrape down walls with a putty knife. Not trying to find/create new problems, but to remove any loose or flaky areas. To our great surprise, the majority of the wall touching the external side of the house almost completely flaked off. Besides this, there were a number of nail pops as well as several regions where the wall had completely disintegrated.

In order to fix this, I had to do some pretty serious surface preparation of the existing walls. Instead of just scraping, I found it very useful to use a random orbital sander with 70 grit sandpaper. This removed all of the very loose material on the paper surface of the wall and enabled me to remove any loose material around the nail popped areas as well. Moreover, there were several areas where the settling of the house had caused cracks, especially around the window and doors. Here, I found it very useful to take a utility knife and remove a good section of the crack to remove any loose gypsum and completely start over with solid surfaces. I also put in about 50 screws to hold on the drywall and used a nail set to drive in each wayward nail. After this, I used a mesh adhesive tape to cover up cracks and provide transitions where needed.

With the walls ready for a surface coat we decided to coat the walls and ceiling with joint compound. In order to do this, a friend of mine, Tim Petrie, significantly watered down two large buckets of joint compound and proceeded to coat the entire room. After this I sanded and applied several more coats and areas that needed significant help. You can see the results below.

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Naturally, this was a very dusty, dirty, process and the cleanup involved a significant amount of work. Chrissy couldn’t resist a quick photo to capture my misery.

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The most important part of the cleanup process was removing all dust from walls. We did this by using a shop vac (with a bag instead of a filter) to get any loose dust out of the room, then migrated to cheesecloth, and finally used some very mildly damp rags and wiped down the walls.

After this, we applied a solid layer of Benjamin Moore’s acrylic primer through the entire room. We found the primer worked excellently, however the fumes were pretty strong and Chrissy had to step aside. After allowing a day for everything to dry, we finished with the final two coats on the walls of restoration hardware paint.

We finished two days before the baby was born, much to our relief. We call that just-in-time production.

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Personal Projects & Interests

David

Well, we didn’t expect this to happen today (Chrissy was scheduled to be induced tomorrow), but we are proud to announce the birth of our baby boy. He was born this morning at 5:15 weighing 8 lb 10 oz. Some initial pictures below, if the link below doesn’t work, click the direct link here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23298466@N06/

Static shot of two pics:

chrissy, ellie, david and tim

little david

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Personal Projects & Interests

Team of Rivals Review

Pulitzer winner Goodwin has long demonstrated a feel for biography as a gateway into the past. In Lincoln, one of our greatest presidents, she has found an ideal subject for her attention. He is the more interesting to study because, unlike most presidents, who have sought to surround themselves in their cabinets with safe men who think like they do on important matters, Lincoln chose to build a cabinet out of men whose relationship to the president was problematic, if not downright risky. In 1861, Lincoln persuaded three of his rivals for the Republican nomination -Seward, Chase and Banks-to sit in his cabinet. They owed Lincoln nothing. As a rule, they saw Lincoln as a man of low ability and little promise, president by the accident of geography. Furthermore, some were enemies who would barely talk to each other. Yet, the cabinet did not dissolve in warfare and Lincoln established firm control over executive decisions, much to the surprise of Seward in particular, who had assumed that he, and not the president, would lead this group and be the true decisionmaker in Washington. In short while, Seward and Banks became firm allies of Lincoln; indeed, Seward became Lincoln’s fastest friend in the Washington power ranks. When Stanton joined the cabinet as secretary of war, he too was converted to allegiance to Lincoln although he had publicly slighted him years before. The only cabinet member whose loyalty remained suspect was Chase, whose lust for the presidency in 1864 blinded him to his own duplicity as he sought to undermine Lincoln and gain support for his own candidacy.

Chase was not above political blackmail: three times, he submitted his resignation to Lincoln and three times Lincoln, who valued Chase’s substantial ability to get things done in a key office and who would rather have Chase inside his tent than outside, persuaded him to remain. Chase proffered his resignation for the fourth time in 1864. This time, he had overplayed his hand: Lincoln, who by then had secured renomination by the Republican party, no longer needed Chase and didn’t need to fear him, so he accepted his resignation without further discussing it with Chase. When Chase heard, he was shocked, even though he’d asked for it. Lincoln tempered the blow by dismissing Chase’s rival in the Cabinet at the same time, maintaining a balance of interests in the group, and when an opening on the Supreme Court became available, he appointed Chase, an act of magnanimity unimaginable in any of Lincoln’s successors.

Recently, I read a very interesting “moral biography” of Lincoln’s early years (up to 1861), Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography, by William Lee Miller. Goodwin’s fine biography made a good counterpoint to Miller’s more limited and focused study. Both made the same point, that Lincoln succeeded as president, and excelled in the role, because he complemented his exceptional political talents and strong intellectual ability with a consistent ethical focus. There has never been another American president with such a strong moral compass as Lincoln and none who heeded it so consistently.

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Personal Projects & Interests

Bella

Bella is a film about living. This is a beautiful and moving film which touched so many emotions deep within me. It is difficult to know how I would’ve viewed this film if I wasn’t a father of two young girls, but I think this film can touch everybody on some level. The themes in this film circle around love, embracing life, and family.

It baffles me how some in our culture cannot embrace life in all its forms simply because the inconvenience it might cause, or because of the potential inconvenience it could be to an unwanted child. This issue also surprises me greatly because I cannot understand how modern liberal humanism can excuse this away. I know that Francis Schaeffer would argue that the modern humanist stance on abortion is a natural cause of modern cosmology, but it seems so logically inconsistent to say that a person’s right to not have someone else living is more important than the life of that individual. I know it all basically comes down to the belief that there’s something non-spiritual about life, and where life begins, from a humanistic standpoint, is simply where particular electrochemical processes happen in the brain. Naturally this is a very slippery slope in one which I shudder to think of the implications of.

I’m only reminded of the philosophy of Peter Singer, who advocates that it is not morally wrong to kill an infant within minutes after its birth. I simply cannot understand how someone can see a fetus’s presence in the birth canal as causing biological change, and I’m sure that no one does, even though several arguments with abortion proponents of claimed that this is the case and the true meaning of “life begins at birth, not conception”.

At this point I’m no longer writing about the film but on a particular topic which I spend a good bit of time considering. In the Senate youth program, there was a young lady who, as a Quaker, did not believe that it was consistent to be a pacifist unless she was also pro-life. This person was not from a conservative Christian right, but I do think they had a very consistent world-view. I also remember a very politically liberal friend at MIT who believed that it was also morally wrong to legalise abortion. In the context of these experiences I find myself asking how Christians can support the left side or political spectrum in light of their embracing this particular issue. A friend of mine who’s a congressional staffer shed some light on this. He explained a good friend of his who while a conservative Christian has decided to vote for Barak Obama. His justification was that abortion is pretty much a non-issue, in the sense that neither party is ready to change the status quo. If this is the case then the greater moral wrong from this person’s eyes was the war in Iraq are many more lives, in his view, has been lost then in abortion. While I find several huge flaws in his reasoning, it is least is a consistent argument that I can disagree with. In any case, this is a serious issue with which I think all Christians must seriously wrestle.

Oh well, back to the movie. The acting was absolutely excellent, the score fantastic, and the storyline thought-provoking. I see so many movies searching for a movie just like this one, which encourages me to embrace life and be a better person. So many movies are either nihilistic, or simply inane. They lack the depth and tenor of this movie. The family interactions were so healthy, so clean, and so beautifully realistic. I would give this movie my highest recommendation to everyone, and consider this to be the best movie I’ve seen this year.

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Career & Productivity

Ubuntu Troubles: Lost write access to root filesystem

Recently, I was in class and, after a suspend, I lost write access to my root filesystem on my eeepc 1000h. This was a really pernicious problem, because I couldn’t do anything to save my notes. It was a very difficult problem to get help with in #ubuntu on IRC and I had to get my hands more dirty than I normally like. More confirmation that linux is amazing, but not really ready for the average desktop user.

After trying some websearch, I turned to #ubuntu on IRC for some help where I was helped by jrib, and RussM. After some discussion with them, it became clear that I needed to boot from a rescue CD and run fsck.

As I couldn’t even log on to the filesytem, the first thing I had to do was to make a boot disk using my usb drive.

Per the directions on, http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/node/21, I typed:


tim@Lincoln:~$ sudo apt-get install syslinux
/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
...
/dev/sdb1 on /media/disk type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,shortname=mixed,uid=1000,utf8,umask=077,flush)
/dev/scd0 on /media/cdrom0 type udf (ro,nosuid,nodev,utf8,user=tim)

I noted that /dev/sdb1 seemed to be the usb drive so I typed:


tim@Lincoln:/dev$ sudo syslinux /dev/sdb1

Now I needed to get a copy of the “Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix disk” available at http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/


tim@Lincoln:~/tmp$ wget http://rescubuntu.info/files/iso/ubuntu-rescue-remix-8.10.iso
--2009-02-22 11:31:27--  http://rescubuntu.info/files/iso/ubuntu-rescue-remix-8.10.iso
Resolving rescubuntu.info... 68.178.254.120
Connecting to rescubuntu.info|68.178.254.120|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 164347904 (157M) [text/plain]
Saving to: `ubuntu-rescue-remix-8.10.iso'

100%[======================================>] 164,347,904  340K/s   in 8m 3s

2009-02-22 11:39:31 (333 KB/s) - `ubuntu-rescue-remix-8.10.iso' saved [164347904/164347904]

tim@Lincoln:~/tmp$ md5sum ubuntu-rescue-remix-8.10.iso
ef32541cb6f33dbe9840a9bc56e7cb27  ubuntu-rescue-remix-8.10.iso
tim@Lincoln:~/tmp$ cd mnt/isolinux
tim@Lincoln:~/tmp/mnt/isolinux$ cp * /media/disk/
tim@Lincoln:~/tmp/mnt/isolinux$ cd /media/disk/
tim@Lincoln:/media/disk$ ls
boot.cat   isolinux.bin  isolinux.txt  ldlinux.sys  System
Documents  isolinux.cfg  LaunchU3.exe  splash.rle
tim@Lincoln:/media/disk$ mv isolinux.cfg syslinux.cfg

Now, I ejected the flash drive and placed it into my left (<– important) usb drive on my eeepc. By holding F2 during startup, I set my boot options to boot first off of the CD. After startup, however, I was presented with the normal grub menu and booting to ubuntu produced the previous error.

Please comment if you have any suggestions as I press forward with this problem. I’ll update and inform the world with what I find.

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Personal Projects & Interests

Booher Life Vision

I envision my life to eventually become:
* a life of worship
* a life of service
* a life of learning
* a life of joy

I picture myself as a man who:
* to be morally pure and dedicated to God
* has time for people, elder in the church
* can play piano
* can talk about history
* is deep, can engage with people
* can speak german, spanish, etc (languages)
* is a subject matter expert
* is in shape
* can write
* is engaged in a number of communities
* is good in chess

Every day I want to be cultivating:

fitness:
* racing schedule
* general fitness

h2. Studia Humanitatis

comprising grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, poetry and history

h3. Grammar

Grammar is the field of linguistics that covers the conventions governing the use of any given natural language.
Learning languages

Fluency in how the world works in the following subject matters:
* Business and Economics
* Fine Arts and Music
* Literature & English Language
* Philosophy & Intellectual History
* Religion
* Science and Mathematics
* Social Sciences

h3. Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the art of using language as a means to persuade
I want to learn how to write, to communicate effectively, to be a ‘man of letters’
blog
I am convinced that I learn more by production and synthesis than input

h3. Moral Philosophy

Devotional understanding

h3. Art (poetry)

Music: piano, on basement . . .
Drawing:

h3. History

Understanding the past

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Engineering & Code

pdf rtex

I love LaTeX and I love ruby/rails. I want to use rtex, it seems perfect for me. But, I am having trouble and am looking for help — once i get this working i’ll make a blog post for the world.

First, do i have what it takes?


tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which pdflatex
/usr/bin/pdflatex
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which latex
/usr/bin/latex
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which rtex
/usr/bin/rtex
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which pdflatex
/usr/bin/pdflatex
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ rails -v
Rails 2.2.2
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [i486-linux]
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ more /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=intrepid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.10"

Now I need a rails app to test this with:


rails test_rails/
cd test_rails/
./script/generate controller make_pdf

i was getting a sqlite3 error and I had to


sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

Now I needed a model to work with, so using the scaffold generator:


./script/generate scaffold Item name:string purpose:string next_step:text
rake db:migrate

in emacs, i created, app/views/layouts/application.pdf.rtex


documentclass[12pt]{article}
 begin{document}

 end{document}

i also created: show_pdf.pdf.rtex in app/views/make_pdf


  section*{Items}
  begin{itemize}
     @items %>
  end{itemize}

now i create the controller:


class MakePdfController < ApplicationController

def index
end

def show_pdf
    @items = Item.find(:all)
end

end

but from ./script/server and went to http://localhost:3000/make_pdf/show_pdf.pdf


Routing Error

No route matches "/make_pdf/show_pdf.pdf" with {:method=>:get}

I thought i might need to initialize the gem as a plugin


test_rails$ rtex -i .
Installed at ./vendor/plugins/rtex

but i still get the same error after restarting mongrel

after adding config.gem “rtex” to my environment.rb and getting a nasty stack error (caused because i enabled a gem and a plugin). i realized that i can’t use both together and commented out the config.gem “rtex”.

in discussions with August Lilleaas on IRC, it became clear that I needed to add:

map.connect ":controller/:action.:format"

to my routes.rb.

Now, this is very close to working — when i load: http://localhost:3000/make_pdf/show_pdf.pdf in firefox, I can open or save. If I save, all I get is simple text:


documentclass[12pt]{article}
 begin{document}
      section*{Items}
  begin{itemize}

  end{itemize}

 end{document}

if I try to open (in ubuntu using document viewer) I get:


File type TeX document (text/x-tex) is not supported

As an interesting aside, I wanted to test that rtex was actually working.

Creating a textile file test.textile with some basic textile.


rtex -o output.pdf -f textile test.textile

generates output.pdf, which is a true pdf formatted file.

After some excellent help from Bruce Williams, I was able to get it working just fine — just download the new gem (rtex 2.1.0, and you should be fine)

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Engineering & Code

Generating PDF files with RTeX

I love LaTeX and I love ruby/rails. I want to use rtex, it seems perfect for me. But, I am having trouble and am looking for help — once i get this working i’ll make a blog post for the world.

First, do i have what it takes?


tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which pdflatex
/usr/bin/pdflatex
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which latex
/usr/bin/latex
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which rtex
/usr/bin/rtex
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which pdflatex
/usr/bin/pdflatex
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ rails -v
Rails 2.2.2
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [i486-linux]
tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ more /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=intrepid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.10"

Now I need a rails app to test this with:


rails test_rails/
cd test_rails/
./script/generate controller make_pdf

i was getting a sqlite3 error and I had to


sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

Now I needed a model to work with, so using the scaffold generator:


./script/generate scaffold Item name:string purpose:string next_step:text
rake db:migrate

in emacs, i created, app/views/layouts/application.pdf.rtex


documentclass[12pt]{article}
 begin{document}

 end{document}

i also created: show_pdf.pdf.rtex in app/views/make_pdf


  section*{Items}
  begin{itemize}
     @items %>
  end{itemize}

now i create the controller:


class MakePdfController < ApplicationController

def index
end

def show_pdf
    @items = Item.find(:all)
end

end

but from ./script/server and went to http://localhost:3000/make_pdf/show_pdf.pdf


Routing Error

No route matches "/make_pdf/show_pdf.pdf" with {:method=>:get}

I thought i might need to initialize the gem as a plugin


test_rails$ rtex -i .
Installed at ./vendor/plugins/rtex

but i still get the same error after restarting mongrel

after adding config.gem "rtex" to my environment.rb and getting a nasty stack error (caused because i enabled a gem and a plugin). i realized that i can't use both together and commented out the config.gem "rtex".

in discussions with August Lilleaas on IRC, it became clear that I needed to add:

map.connect ":controller/:action.:format"

to my routes.rb.

Now, this is very close to working -- when i load: http://localhost:3000/make_pdf/show_pdf.pdf in firefox, I can open or save. If I save, all I get is simple text:


documentclass[12pt]{article}
 begin{document}
      section*{Items}
  begin{itemize}

  end{itemize}

 end{document}

if I try to open (in ubuntu using document viewer) I get:


File type TeX document (text/x-tex) is not supported

As an interesting aside, I wanted to test that rtex was actually working.

Creating a textile file test.textile with some basic textile.


rtex -o output.pdf -f textile test.textile

generates output.pdf, which is a true pdf formatted file.

After some excellent help from Bruce Williams, I was able to get it working just fine -- just download the new gem (rtex 2.1.0, and you should be fine)

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