Highlights of My Faith Journey

I decided to write this for the benefit of some people that I know that may have lost their faith in God. This is not an extensive treatise on my faith journey, but a quick summary of the major elements that have me where I am.

Shortly after I was born, my mom noticed that my head didn't look right. After consulting with the pediatrician, they decided my condition required further investigation. It looked like the right side of my head was caved in. It was so noticeable, that baby pictures of me all have me in a hat or some kind of head covering, and I'm turned to show the left side. My head was not right.

Consulting with a neurologist lead to the diagnosis of craniosynostosis. It is a condition where the plates in the skull fuse together prematurely, causing the rest of the skull to develop incorrectly. At the insistence of my pediatrician, it was decided that I would undergo surgery.

The surgery was performed and successful. Other than a really nasty scar on the side of my head, you really can't tell there was ever a problem.

Growing up, I always did well in school. Through grade school and high school, I was in the top 3 of my class. Despite successes in school, I was not a great athlete. I was even worse as making and keeping friends. Quite often, I was picked on in school.

I always struggled with the conversations about how everyone has a talent or gift. I wasn't good at sports, I don't have any musical talent, and any talents I did seem to have always drew ridicule. It was not uncommon for me to get down on myself and wonder if I was really meant to be here. (Just to be clear, I never contemplated suicide, just challenged what my purpose on earth was.)

The feelings of not being meant to be here lingered on and off into my adult life. That is, until my third son came along.

My third son came along, and was a fantastic infant. My mom would always ask about a spot on his forehead that didn't look right, and my wife and I would say it looked fine. After a LOT of asking, we decided to ask our pediatrician about it. She didn't see anything, but recommended an MRI to be safe. The MRI revealed that my son also had craniosynostosis! It was a different spot on his head, but he had the same thing.

All of a sudden, I'm in a whirlwind of doctor's visits that lead to the decision for my 9-month-old son to have the same kind of surgery. One afternoon, my wife and I were sitting in the office of a plastic surgeon with our son, talking to the plastic surgeon and a neurosurgeon about the surgery my son was about to undergo. Growing up, my mom always described my surgery as a doctor cutting open my head, inserting a biodegradable plastic thingy, and stitching me up. Here is how my son's surgery was described to me: the plastic surgeon would make an incision from ear to ear on my son's scalp, remove the fused plates on the top of his skull, break them apart, and put them back together with effectively a biodegradable erector set. What?!? The neurosurgeon would be present to make sure the membrane separating the skull from the brain wasn't damaged and no other harm came to the brain or nervous system. What?!? The entire surgery would take about 3 hours.

From there, there were numerous hours of planning an preparation to have my son in the hospital with my wife staying with him. Myself and family members donated blood to have on hand just in case. It was overwhelming.

On the day of the surgery, we had to take him to a pre-op room to get him ready. The anesthesiologist gave him a medicine mixture to start slowing him down. Then a nurse took him from my wife's arms and walked him to surgery. We were left to wait in a waiting room for 3 hours. It was the worst 3 hours of my life!

The surgery was successful! Needless to say, during the surgery and since, I have reflected on this quite a bit. My son's surgeons were quite skilled. The neurosurgeon was well-known for his work, and the plastic surgeon was well-known for helping kids with cleft palates. These miracle-workers had done this surgery a lot, and were prepared for everything. When this surgery was done on me, it was not well-known or well-practice. The doctor that operated on me was knowledgeable of neurosurgery, but I don't think he was well-practiced in fixing craniosynostosis. The only conclusion I could draw from these experiences is that my life, like all lives, is a gift from God. He punctuated it for me by carrying me through a very risky surgery when I was just 7 months old. He left a scar on me to remind me of my gift.

I am an imperfect human being, prone to sin. I don't always live my life as I should. I'm not always the beacon of Christ's love for me to others. My I am much more aware of my life as a gift, and I am working daily to be a better disciple.

I hope that my journey to realizing the great gift I've been given will help others recognize their lives as tremendous gifts, given to them by a loving God.

Building/Running the omnisharp-roslyn Project

I've been trying to get involved in the Omnisharp project. Omnisharp is actually a set of projects that are tools to provide many of the experiences present in Visual Studio for other editors like Emacs, Vim, or Sublime. This post is me capturing some of the steps I've gone through to get a part of the Omnisharp project building. Most of this post assumes the reader has an understanding of the DNX environment and its utilities.

Omnisharp has two primary components: a server and a client. The server provides HTTP endpoints that return information about a code base. The client(s) is aa plugin for the user's editor-of-choice that calls the server and uses the data to provide syntax highlighting, code completion, refactorings, etc. The Omnisharp server started life in the omnisharp-server Github project. The latest version is now in the omnisharp-roslyn Github project. It's this project that I've been trying to build.

omnisharp-roslyn provides a build script (either build.cmd or build.sh) to make this a no-brainer. This script tries to set up the local environment, update the required packages, and publish the server. All of this relies on the .NET Execution Environment (DNX). There is nothing wrong with the build script from what I can see. Try it first. I ran into errors with the build script and had to do a few things step-by-step.

Below are the steps I ran to get the omnisharp-roslyn bits running from the code:

dnvm upgrade -unstable

This installed dnx-mono.1.0.0-beta6-12174.

dnvm exec 1.0.0-beta6-12174 dnu restore

This pulled down all the necessary packages.

dnvm use 1.0.0-beta4

This is the version of DNX that omnisharp-roslyn needs.

dnu restore

I'm not sure why.

./scripts/Omnisharp

This runs omnisharp!

You can have Omnisharp index a particular folder or solution file (SLN) by calling:

./scripts/Omnisharp -s /path/to/sln/or/folder

Splunk Searching and Grouping

I'm starting to play with Splunk searching. We process multiple large files every night as the bulk of our work. Our system writes numerous log messages during this processing activity. Every file processed gets a unique identifier. I needed to sort through these logs and group all entries for a given file together. Here is the search I used:

application="MyApp" logger="LoggerName" message="*some part of message*" | rex field=message ".part . (?\d+).*" | transaction id

The first section of the search (application="MyApp" logger="LoggerName" message="*some part of message*") represents the search terms in Splunk. The second portion is a regular expression (rex field=message ".part . (?\d+).*") that is parsing a value out of the message field and giving it the name "id". The last part (transaction id), groups all of the records that are found with the search terms by the "id" value.

Raspberry Pi as Google Cloud Print Server

I made my Raspberry Pi 2 into a Google Cloud Print server today. I wanted to capture the links I used to set this up. There were two blog posts that I followed. The first thing I had to do was to add a printer to the Pi. This link walks you through the setup. Once the Pi knew about my printer, I could configure the Google Cloud Print service. This post walks you through that set up.

How to Think About Application Logging

A colleague of mine talked about how Splunk has changed our way of thinking about application logging. The analogy he used was that we used to think about logging as storytelling (i.e. Job1 is starting, Doing task 1, Doing task 2, ..., Job1 finished). It is much like "In the beginning... something happened... then something else happened... The End." Splunk has gotten us into the habit of thinking about logging as a series of statements that can be grouped together with the Splunk search tools (i.e. Job=1, Message=Doing something; Job=1, Message=Doing something else; ...). This is a powerful shift in thinking that allows us to better troubleshoot and diagnose system issues.

Consolidation

I have posted to a blog minimally over the past several years. Over those years, I've posted technology and career related posts to one blog and faith related posts to another blog. The split-brained approach has never felt natural to me. To make it easier for me to post things, I'm creating a single place to blog. Over time, I may bring over some of the posts, especially the software development ones. Mostly this new blog is an attempt to make it easier for me to post.