Ben & Sonia Mathews -

Christmas Letter 2009

Ben Mathews — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:08:34 -0800

Dear Family and Friends,

We hope that this letter finds you and yours healthy and happy at the end of another busy year.

2009 has been an eventful year for the Mathews… In May Ben’s father died after years of struggling with a brain injury, colon cancer, and other ailments. We miss him and think of Grandpa often. Sonia’s parents moved to Utah in October. We enjoy having them close by.

We love traveling and started off the year with a trip over Spring Break for Sonia and the children to visit her Sacramento family. Our second trip was to Oregon in May to be with Ben’s father before he died and attend his funeral. In July we went to Ben’s Barker family reunion. This was Sonia’s first time attending in the nine years that we have been married. We had a good experience and she especially enjoyed rafting down the Boise River as a family. In October we went on this year’s big family vacation to Disneyland. Grandma Mathews joined us. We had an amazing time and Ben was a good sport!

Ben’s life seems to get busier by the year. He spends his free time developing and maintaining a family history website, exercising, gardening, fulfilling his church responsibilities, and being a dad and husband.

Sonia loves being a mother and home maker. Our children keep her busy with all of their activities. She has lost 30 lbs. since August and really enjoys her Zumba class. She volunteers regularly in church as a Relief Society teacher and as an Activity Day’s leader to the 8/9 year old girls. A highlight this year was attending Women’s Conference in the spring. She has almost completed the U.S. naturalization process. She loves Canada, but feels her future is in the United States and wants to vote.

Our children are growing and thriving and bring us joy. Katrina, our eldest is eight years old and attends third grade. This year, she has danced, swam, played soccer and sung in her school choir. Katrina loves being active, playing with friends, cooking, baking, riding her bike, and reading. We are proud of her accomplishments.

Samuel started kindergarten this year. He loves socializing and is learning to read. He has been involved in All-Sports classes, swimming, and soccer. Samuel is loving and generous. He wants to be in charge and tries to be a good leader.

Sarah, our four year old princess, loves all the girly stuff. She too has been involved in All–Sports, swimming, gymnastics, and dance. She and I do a mommy-and-me preschool several times a week.

Andrei, Sonia’s brother, has been living with us for the last year. He works at a Japanese restaurant and will be starting school at Utah Valley University in January.

Best Wishes,

Ben, Sonia, and Children

Pornography is really, really bad for you, your family, and your community

Ben Mathews — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 07:43:06 -0800

We have been told by church leaders, sociologists, biologists, and family researchers for years how detrimental pornography is to an individual, his family, and community. Despite these warnings, pornography is a 1.8 billion dollar industry in the US.

The Sutherland Institute has released a study that synthesizes all available research on pornography. It finds that:

THE FAMILY AND PORNOGRAPHY

Married men who are involved in pornography feel less satisfied with their conjugal relations and less emotionally attached to their wives. Wives notice and are upset by the difference.
Pornography use is a pathway to infidelity and divorce, and is frequently a major factor in these family disasters.
Among couples affected by one spouse’s addiction, two-thirds experience a loss of interest in sexual intercourse.
Both spouses perceive pornography viewing as tantamount to infidelity.
Pornography viewing leads to a loss of interest in good family relations.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND PORNOGRAPHY

Pornography is addictive, and neuroscientists are beginning to map the biological substrate of this addiction.
Users tend to become desensitized to the type of pornorgraphy they use, become bored with it, and then seek more perverse forms of pornography.
Men who view pornography regularly have a higher tolerance for abnormal sexuality, including rape, sexual aggression, and sexual promiscuity.
Prolonged consumption of pornography by men produces stronger notions of women as commodities or as “sex objects.”
Pornography engenders greater sexual permissiveness, which in turn leads to a greater risk of out-of-wedlock births and STDs. These, in turn, lead to still more weaknesses and debilities.
Child-sex offenders are more likely to view pornography regularly or to be involved in its distribution.

OTHER EFFECTS OF PORNOGRAPHY

Many adolescents who view pornography initially feel shame, diminished self-confidence, and sexual uncertainty, but these feelings quickly shift to unadulterated enjoyment with regular viewing.
The presence of sexually oriented businesses significantly harms the surrounding community, leading to increases in crime and decreases in property values.
The main defenses against pornography are close family life, a good marriage and good relations between parents and children, coupled with deliberate parental monitoring of Internet use. Traditionally, government has kept a tight lid on sexual traffic and businesses, but in matters of pornography that has waned almost completely, except where child pornography is concerned. Given the massive, deleterious individual, marital, family, and social effects of pornography, it is time for citizens, communities, and government to reconsider their laissez-faire approach.

If you use pornography, stop. If you know someone that uses pornography, help them to stop. Go read the report now.

Global warming is a fraud

Ben Mathews — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:33:38 -0800

If there are any remaining questions (and there shouldn't be), this explosive cache of emails and documents reveals that global warming proponents manipulated and suppressed evidence to advance their agenda.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-...

VisiPics - free software to find and remove duplicate pictures

Ben Mathews — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:24:20 -0800

Like everyone who with a couple years of using a digital camera, I’ve got a lot of pictures on my hard drive. And with a lot of pictures, came a lot of duplicates. Between a couple backups that got merged together and taking four pictures of each scene, I mean a LOT of duplicates.

After a lot searching, I found VisiPics, which identifies duplicate pictures. It is fast and does a fantastic job identifying pictures that are identical, but also can pick out pictures that are almost the same to let you pick the best of the four poses you took. My only complaint is that the preview of the duplicates is so small that it is hard to decide between them. VisiPics is free and has my strong recommendation.

A simple way to know you're missing some leadership skills

Ben Mathews — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:48:54 -0700

"You believe in some great practices that the team needs to follow, but you can't convince or get the team to follow them - even the simplest ones."

"If that happens to you - it's time to visit the idea that you may be lacking some core people skills, and leadership skills."

Ouch, what an indictment. But, it is true. If I want to make positive changes and can't lift the proverbial lantern high enough for them to see, it is my problem. Those that I'm failing to influence don't see a problem or get frustrated. I guess it is time for a refresher read of some of my old books on the subject. Covey, Carnegie, etc, here I come.

http://5whys.com/blog/a-simple-way-to-know-youre-missing-some-leadership...

System Notes - My favorite mercurial extensions

Ben Mathews — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:52:27 -0700

There is a lot that the base Mercurial can do, but a robust extension mechanism allows all kinds of nice enhancements. We use BigFiles, and Forest, but there is lots more you can do. All of the publicly available extensions are listed at http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/UsingExtensions. Here are some of my favorite mercurial extensions and how I use them.

alias - user-defined command aliases
pbranch - Collaborative and/or long-term patch development and maintenance
purge - all files and dirs in the repository that are not being tracked by Mercurial
convert - Convert repositories from other SCMs into Mercurial
share - Share repository history between multiple repos

alias - user-defined command aliases

I love my command line, but don't like typing long commands over and over. Alias makes it all work out. Instead of typing hg pull ssh://hg@mercurial.wilcoxassoc.com/PcDmis/QA, I simply type hg pullQ. I've got about 10 entries in my mercurial.ini that cover all the normal commands I might type.

pbranch - Collaborative and/or long-term patch development and maintenance

I was initially quite excited about Attic/Shelve which allows a user to convinently shelve changes for later use. After more review, I found Attic too simplistic. The extension author advertises it for "quick and dirty" patch mangement, but I wanted more. Mq promises the ability to do almost magical things with a mercurial repository. I found it too complex and error prone for my taste. It is bolted on top of mercurial instead of using it and has ways of loosing work. Mq also lacks the ability to have multiple lines of development which to my mind is the primary reason to have patches.

Pbranch seems to solve my problems with Attic and Mq. It has all the power I could hope for. It uses Mercurial concepts so I didn't have to learn much to feel comfortable. If you already understand committing and named branches, there isn't much left to learn.

A typical workflow might look like this:

Create a new patch

>>>hg pnew NewPatch
marked working directory as branch NewPatch

do some work...

>>>hg commit -m"work"

do some more work...

>>>hg commit -m"more work"

Show your patch graph

>>>hg pgraph
@  NewPatch
|
o  default

Your patch is marked as starting at a given changeset. Others work needs to be pulled into your patch

>>>hg pmerge
NewPatch: merging from default
merging asdf
0 files updated, 1 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
.hgpatchinfo/NewPatch.dep already tracked!

You can see in the graphical log what happened. PGraph pulled the changes on mainline into the patch

>>>hg glog
@    changeset:   5:c76094c77c8f
|\   branch:      NewPatch
| |  tag:         tip
| |  parent:      3:9ace0ba2d369
| |  parent:      4:329504378326
| |  user:        Ben Mathews 
| |  date:        Thu Aug 20 16:07:09 2009 -0600
| |  summary:     merge of default
| |
| o  changeset:   4:329504378326
| |  parent:      0:30a5ae17ec4d
| |  user:        Ben Mathews 
| |  date:        Thu Aug 20 16:06:58 2009 -0600
| |  summary:     work on mainline
| |
o |  changeset:   3:9ace0ba2d369
| |  branch:      NewPatch
| |  user:        Ben Mathews 
| |  date:        Thu Aug 20 16:06:24 2009 -0600
| |  summary:     more work
| |
o |  changeset:   2:f7e7988453c0
| |  branch:      NewPatch
| |  user:        Ben Mathews 

| |  date:        Thu Aug 20 16:06:10 2009 -0600
| |  summary:     work
| |
o |  changeset:   1:c5cd26061a49
|/   branch:      NewPatch
|    user:        Ben Mathews 
|    date:        Thu Aug 20 16:05:57 2009 -0600
|    summary:     start new patch on default
|
o  changeset:   0:30a5ae17ec4d
   user:        Ben Mathews 
   date:        Thu Aug 20 16:05:48 2009 -0600
   summary:     base

When it comes time to apply the patch, dump it out and apply it as a real changeset.

>>>hg pdiff > ..\patch

>>>hg up default
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 1 files removed, 0 files unresolved

>>>hg import -m"apply pbranch patch" ..\patch
applying ..\patch

purge - all files and dirs in the repository that are not being tracked by Mercurial

Purge is clean on steroids. Running purge --all leaves your repository as if you just cloned it. You are guaranteed no strange errors from left over obj and pch files. This is a simple command, and I use it regularly.

convert - Convert repositories from other SCMs into Mercurial

Unlike Purge, I don't use Convert very often. When I do, it is pretty impressive. The primary purpose of the extension is to import other source control systems into mercurial. The part that I love though is its filemap feature. Using it, I can slice and dice a repository into the shape I want it. One recent case that I used it for was with our Math library. I wanted to change the name of a directory and remove a couple of the files. I could have renamed the directory and deleted the files, but then the history wouldn't have been consistent. Using convert, I rewrote the history so that the it was as if the deleted files had never existed and the renamed files had always been renamed.

share - Share repository history between multiple repos

I like to keep several copies of our repository around so I can work on different projects. This means that I'm always shuffling changesets around and never have all my copies quite up to date. The share extension allows my several repositories to share one history store and only do one pull.

Because our repository is so large, having multiple clones causes problems with disk space. Using the share extension, I can share most of the contents of the .hg directory (history) between multiple working directories. A full clone of our repository takes 781mb on disk. By using the share extension, I can reduce this to the 149mb that the tip revision takes when checked out into the working directory.

A Portrait of Mormons in the U.S.

Ben Mathews — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:47:20 -0700

"A new analysis of the Landscape Survey data reveals that as a group Mormons are among the most devout and conservative religious people in the country. The Mormon community is also internally diverse, with differences according to levels of religious commitment and educational attainment, regions of the country where Mormons live, and between lifelong Mormons and those who have converted to the faith. This report explores Mormons' unique place in the American religious landscape and is divided into three parts: demographic characteristics, religious beliefs and practices, and social and political views."

http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=427

System Notes - Fun with branching and merging

Ben Mathews — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:03:03 -0700

Note: My company recently started using Mercurial. I wrote this article to provide some education on the value of branches.

There have been some emails flying around discussing making branches so we can “isolate changes.” I thought some discussion of what a branch is and what it is good for was warranted.

A branch isn’t anything complicated. It is simply a way for to make some changes without sharing them with everyone else. Jeff Atwood describes branching as a parallel universe. "They're places where, for whatever reason, history didn't go quite the same way as it did in your universe." In our company, we could have used a "parallel universe" to:

Upgrade to a new compiler while everyone else works on the old one.
Add in a new graphics engine without lots of ugly preprocessor macros
Develop a new feature that is poorly defined and therefore risky

Branching would have simplified the contention developers from different parts of the company faced.

To get technical, in mercurial anytime two changesets are committed against a common parent, a branch is created. A simple illustration shows how this works.

L:\illustration>hg commit -A -m "root"
adding test.txt


<<do some work>>

L:\illustration>hg commit -m "branch a"

Back up to a parent changeset. Remember, branches are created by making multiple commits to a given changeset.

L:\illustration>hg up 0 
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

<<do some work>>

L:\illustration>hg commit -m "branch b"

created new head

L:\illustration>hg glog
@  changeset:   2:fa2d515d48a1
|  tag:         tip
|  parent:      0:376cbd5c11ae
|  user:        Ben Mathews <Ben.Mathews@HexagonMetrology.com>
|  date:        Mon Jul 13 12:52:11 2009 -0600
|  summary:     branch b

|
| o  changeset:   1:b4376a3bc2af
|/   user:        Ben Mathews <Ben.Mathews@HexagonMetrology.com>
|    date:        Mon Jul 13 12:51:52 2009 -0600
|    summary:     branch a
|
o  changeset:   0:376cbd5c11ae
   user:        Ben Mathews <Ben.Mathews@HexagonMetrology.com>
   date:        Mon Jul 13 12:51:23 2009 -0600
   summary:     root

This gives us a TortoiseHg changelog like this

Complications

Nothing comes free in life, and branching does have its problems. There is some complexity tracking which changes are where and eventually, those parallel universes have to be merged back together.

There is a trade off between complexity and code safety. No branches avoids all the complexity, but gives us none of the benefits. Thousands of branches buries the benefits in the overhead of tracking and maintaining them. At some point in the middle, there is a sweet spot where branches protect the source code, but are not too much hassle the work with.

Merging without branches

Branches give the appearance of causing merge problems because we often procrastinate merging branches until it is really hard. But, what branches really do is give you control when the merging is done. If we worked on one mainline with no branches, we still have to merge our work with other developers. The difference is we have no control over when the merging is done. The timing is dictated by when the other programmers push their changes to the server, not when it is convenient for me to merge. With branches, I decided when I want to incorporate others work into mine. Lets look how this works

<<do some work>>

L:\illustration\client>hg commit -A -m "more work"

Meanwhile, the other guy is working away and beats you pushing code up

<<do some work>>

L:\illustration\client2>hg commit -m "other guys work"

L:\illustration\client2>hg push
pushing to l:\illustration\server
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files

This means you can't push without doing the whole pull, merge routine. (You have had to do this a couple times right?)

L:\illustration\client>hg push
pushing to l:\illustration\server
searching for changes
abort: push creates new remote heads!
(did you forget to merge? use push -f to force)

L:\illustration\client>hg pull
pulling from l:\illustration\server
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files (+1 heads)
(run 'hg heads' to see heads, 'hg merge' to merge)

L:\illustration\client>hg merge
merging test.txt
0 files updated, 1 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
(branch merge, don't forget to commit)

L:\illustration\client>hg commit

L:\illustration\client>hg push
pushing to l:\illustration\server
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 2 changesets with 2 changes to 1 files

Using this method, your changelog will start to get a lot of these loops in it. A couple times doing this and it gets frustrating. I've heard some of this frustration and sympathize with you. Frustration naturally begets shortcuts like not compiling a merge or testing completely. Let us look at an easier alternative using branches.

Merging with branches

Here we use a model were our changes stay on a branch until we are done with them. To ease merging at the end of what could be a long running branch, we ocasionaly do a reverse merge, pulling others changes into our branch. When we are done, we merge our changes into the mainline.

We want to create a branch, so go ahead and force a push that creates multiple heads.

L:\illustration2\client1>hg push
pushing to l:\illustration2\server
searching for changes
abort: push creates new remote heads!
(did you forget to merge? use push -f to force)

L:\illustration2\client1>hg push -f
pushing to l:\illustration2\server
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 0 changes to 1 files (+1 heads)

Now, we do some more work uninteruppted by others changes. However, we can't ignore others changes completely. Every change you and the other guys make is diverging the two branches. You could wait until the end of your efforts to merge the other guys changes in, but that would probably be really hard. To make it easier, ocassionally pull in others changes to your branch.

L:\illustration2\client1>hg pull
pulling from l:\illustration2\server
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 4 changesets with 2 changes to 1 files (+1 heads)
(run 'hg heads' to see heads, 'hg merge' to merge)

L:\illustration2\client1>hg merge
merging test.txt
0 files updated, 1 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
(branch merge, don't forget to commit)

Eventually, you have finished with this branch and are ready to merge it back to the mainline. Switch to the mainline and merge the branch into it.

L:\illustration2\client1>hg up 10 -C
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

L:\illustration2\client1>hg merge
merging test.txt
0 files updated, 1 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
(branch merge, don't forget to commit)

L:\illustration2\client1>hg commit

Liberty Is Not a Mistress, But a Grandmother

Ben Mathews — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:43:28 -0700

Jeff Lindsay writes a great poem on liberty, its fragile nature, and the continuing care it needs.

Liberty is not a young mistress:
Convenient, alluring, fragrant skin
Glistening even in the darkest shadows...

Freedom Festival 5K

Ben Mathews — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:32:21 -0700

http://results.active.com/pages/oneResult.jsp?pID=61843011&rsID=46063

I ran the Freedom Festival 5K yesterday in 23:26, a 3:50 improvement over last year. This gets me into the "sort of in shape" level of fitness. But, it has been so long since I've been at this level, that it feels really great. Now, if my calves would stop cramping.