Rious

I just joined a small group at our church, Chattanooga Vineyard, focusing on what we can do in Chattanooga, TN to stop human trafficking and slavery.  We are planning a race in November to raise money for Free For Life Ministries.  I’m helping them setup their social media campaign.  We now have a website http://www.setfreechattanooga.org.  We also have a Twitter account @setfreechat.

If you want to help, or just want to know more about human trafficking please visit our site or shoot me a message.

We are transitioning from Mongrels & Apache to JRuby & Glassfish v3.  We use Cookie Session Stores in our RoR app Knetwit, they’re the default session store and work well for our load-balancing requirements.  When we switched to Jruby/Glassfish, instead of our RoR cookies clients were recieving JSESSIONID cookies.  Since the RoR session cookies actually store the session data and JSESSIONIDs do not our session load-balancing failed.

There are numerous solutions to load-balancing with Glassfish clusters and special Sticky Glassfish Clusters.  This seems to be the most common answer to our trouble, but it introduces more variables into the transition.

In the end we set our

config.action_controller.session_store = cookie_store

and we were back in business.

Hopefully this helps someone else transitioning to JRuby/Glassfish.

We just started our Wilderness Lodge vacation in Sevierville, TN (ourside of Knoxville).  Left work early, drove the 2 hours from Chattanooga and went straight to the indoor waterpark after supper.  Andrew loved the kiddie pool slide, but wasn’t too sure about the wave pool, being an hour past his bedtime already probably didn’t help.  Haven’t taken any pictures off the camera yet, but we are having fun testing our new Olympus Stylus 770SW - waterproof, shockproof, freezeproof camera.  Tomorrow I’ll see if we can get any pictures online.

As we were getting ready to leave the pool side (there is a trolley that shuttles you from the hotel to the waterpark) a man collapsed.  The lifeguard were quick to respond with CPR and the AED.  The the paramedics arrived in an ambulance and took the man away as we were boarding the trolley.  Much to our suprise the ambulance was in the front parking lot of the hotel when we arrived.  We didn’t have to wonder why for long, as a Medevac helicopter landed and he was transfered into it from the ambulance.

All in all, an enjoyable trip.  Will keep you posted.

I had the realization recently that a major source of sin and trouble in my life was fear.  Fear at work drives me to a negative attitude, looking to blame others, or to give up because I am afraid that the outcome of my labour will be fruitless.  Fear of not being in control stops me from being kind and compassionate to others, fearing that I need instead to judge and correct them. Fear of not having enough, or being cheated stopping me from forgiving others.  Fear of how others might think of me or act towards me stops me from following Christ.  I want to examine each of these fears from a Biblical perspective, to shine some light.

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Went hiking Signal Point to Edwards Point a couple of weeks ago with the guys from work, randomly found a geocache.  So when Mick and I decided to go hiking Signal Point today we officially logged the geocache “Almost Edwards Point“.  As much as we enjoy being outdoors, and having a GPS device, I think geocaching is going to be an ongoing thing for us.

We also found out more about the trails near Rainbow Falls.  We tried (accidentally) part of the blue trail, and got to cross the other swinging bridge.  If you’re in the Chattanooga area and haven’t hiked Signal Point or any of the Cumberland Trails, you need to check them out.

Brian called us just as we were nearing Edwards Point, wanting to know if we wanted to go hike the trail with him today.  Haven’t heard how his adventure went, but I’m excited to find out.

P.S. Anyone wanting to know more about the trails on Signal Mountain should check out Hiking Trail on Signal Mountain.

We’re pushing out some exciting changes to Knetwit, Cooper has some details over on his blog.  Nutshell: new store, and the ability to search for books.

His birthday party was awesome, Katie has a couple of pictures up.  Thanks everyone that showed up, he had a great tme.

One of my cousins just turned the new magic number - 13. The age when you become a true Netizen.  At 13 you can signup to forums, and most importantly, Facebook and MySpace.  This is something that my generation didn’t have to look forward to.  By the time Facebook and MySpace took off we were old enough to play, which is why I had no idea how big of a deal it was until I saw a new friend request this morning.  From the excitement of his posts, and the zeal with which he has added friends, I suspect that my cousin is more excited about joining Facebook today, than he will be when he gets his drivers license in a few years.

Now he has a whole new world opened up to him.  A world where geography is irrelevant.  Instant communication around the globe.  How much longer will he be able to stay in touch with his boyhood friends?  His travelling relatives, like me?  He has spent his entire life, understanding on some level, the real importance of a social network (not the electronic kind, the people kind).  Now he can access the tools to help him grow and nurture his network.  There is no reason why he couldn’t have a network of 1,000 friends or more before he reaches college.

What do you think about the consequences for youths without this advantage?

The blogsphere is starting to pickup on Knetwit for class notes.  In the last several days we were featured on both RotorBlog and Listio, two websites specializing in Web 2.0

Listio is one of the first blogs to mention our study group functionality, but didn’t go into much detail.  The study groups are a recent addition, and they are proving to be very popular with our user base.

RotorBlog had a longer article about Knetwit, and went into some detail about our feature set, also including study groups.

Overall this increase in blog traffic is exciting, it’s great to be on the ground floor watching this thing take off!

Edit:  Wait, make that three with Ziipa listing Knetwit as well.  They include a screenshot, but not many words.