hey everybody!

The pictures

Henry Irvin Barry was born at 11:57 am on December 9th, 2008.

He weighed 7 lb., 7 oz. and was 20 inches long.

So we’re still waiting. I know, I keep jumping at every contraction, but it really does seem at the time that it’s about to happen.

Amy’s currently walking around uncomfortably wondering how long it’ll be before Henry decides it’s time.

So continue what you were doing. Step away from the phone for a minute. Not that far! There, a few feet, that’s good.

They’re about 5 minutes apart now. We’ll probably be headed to the hospital soon.

We went walking at Dicken’s Downtown and Amy started having contractions. They’re currently about 6-7 minutes apart.

More to come…

This is a DIY project waiting to happen.

The combusting stick of wood you see in the picture to the right is brought to you by the guys at MIT. They’ve come up with an ingenious, very inexpensive way to capture solar energy. They’ve built a parabolic dish out of cheap alumnium tubing and lined it with cheap flexible mirror. This creates a focal point that when pointed at the sun gets extremely hot, concentrating the sunlight by a factor of 1,000. Think of melting steal, and you’re about right.

At the focal point of the dish, they’ve run a coil of metal tubing with water running through it. The water gets flash boiled, creating steam. This steam can be used for whatever you need: heat, cooling, electricity, sauna…

Video, Pictures, and the original story.

I’d love to see this hooked up to the Green Steam Engine, which is a small, easy to build steam engine that can be easily hooked up to an electric generator.

My sincere apologies to my mother, who was holding out for a girl after already having 6 male grandchildren, but it looks like she’ll be having lucky number 7, because we’re having another boy!

Amy’s only 14 weeks along right now, so we weren’t scheduled to get an ultrasound for another month or so.  However, it seems events have transpired to allow us to find out sooner than expected.  Early Wednesday morning around 3:00 am Amy woke up with some slight bleeding, which to any expecting woman is definitely not a good thing.  We got hold of the on-call doctor who calmed our nerves a little bit, but still made sure we came in early that morning to check things out.  They did an ultrasound to make sure the baby was moving, and he definitely was!  He was stretching and kicking and smiling… not to mention showing off his wobbly bits.

So we found out early.  We haven’t quite decided on names yet, but we’re close.

I’ve decided to refresh my photography skills and post more pictures, so here’s a start:

And for all the PHP nerds out there, here’s a brief intro on PEAR.

There’s a lot of talk right now about PEAR and how it helps PHP development. So as a result there’s a lot of folks trying to figure out how to get PEAR set up. It’s important to keep in mind that PEAR is just a repository for PHP packages. It’s the packages you want. PEAR is simply a way to download and manage the packages. If you’ve got PHP > 4.3 installed, you’ve probably already got PEAR installed as well. Trying going to the command line and running pear -V. If you get anything besides command not found, then you’ve got PEAR installed.

So once you have PEAR installed, you can download packages by doing the following:

pear install <package name>

This will download the desired package into the extension directory. The extension directory can be changed in the pear.conf file, but it’s usually right in your home directory: ~/pear/lib.

Once you have the desired packages dowloaded, you’ll need to tell your scripts how to access them. PHP is a parsed language, so extensions are simply included in your main scripts. You can include the package files manually, using the full path. For example, if you wanted to include the DB package:

include("/Users/jdoe/pear/lib/php/DB.php");

You could also set PHP’s include_path setting. The following does the same thing:

ini_set("include_path", ".:/Users/jdoe/pear/lib/php");
include("DB.php");

If you’re including more than a single package, the include_path option is cleaner and more elegant.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m interested in all things science, especially biology. Central to biology is evolutionary theory, and as you know this topic is causes a big stir in much of the Christian community.

Here’s a free book from the National Academy of Sciences that discusses evolutionary theory and creationist perspectives. I’ve only skimmed it, but it looks pretty good.