I think part of this misconception is that we have not instilled a culture of discipleship within our community. I am coming to believe that this needs to start among the youngest of our church members, those believers in our children’s ministry.

John MacArthur, speaking at Together for the Gospel 2006, gave a session on Forty Years of Gospel Ministry. At the end of this talk, he gives a description of what I consider a culture of discipleship and the importance of reaching the children in the church.

Every Sunday at your church, there is a collection of non-believers that show up. Ok? Disproportionate to any other group in your church, there is a pile of unregenerate people that show up each Sunday. They are identifiable. They all hang out together. They end up in the same rooms every week. And they are the children in your church. You don’t need to go try and find people around the town who are unbelievers to bring them in and re-invent the church for their sake. You’ve got a phenominal evangelistic field in your children. What are you doing with that? Take your best people, your most gifted communicators, your most finely tuned material, and start there. Start there right on through the youth ministry. And I’ll tell you right now, my children are the product of a passionate, zealous, clear exposure to gospel truth from the start. We even do in our church a ministry, I am always so thrilled my grandchildren get in it. We take 3rd, 4th, 5th grade kids, put then in 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade kids’ classes alongside the teacher so that they can help the teacher and learn how to disciple, teach, and evangelize. We take junior high kids and put them over the juniors. We take high school kids and put them over the junior high. We take college kids and put them in high school or junior high ministry. We have this process going all the time…There is nothing more important. As a father, that is the evangelistic field that I start with in my own home, the salvation of my own children. And as a pastor, that is the most obvious place to do evangelism in the church.

Michelle is a little nervous but doing well.  This being our 4th child, you would think we would be pros at this by now.  It seems all strangely familiar. 

Our bible verse for today is Philippians 4:6-7:  "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

They started the Pitocin drip at 6:30 AM.  She started contracting pretty regularly (every 2-3 minutes) soon afterwards. 

We found out that her regular OB, Dr Denman, couldn’t be here today due to an issue in her family.  We hope and pray that her family is OK.

Dr Flora came in a little while ago to talk to us.  She broke Michelle’s  water around 7:40 AM.  Michelle’s nurses Sarah (who happens to be 39 weeks pregnant with her first child) and Kim (who is an intern) called the anesthesiologist to administer the Epidural.  They said that about 95% of women delivering are now getting an Epidural. 

We found out that there are about 5 inductions this morning and 1 spontaneous birth this morning.  It seems like inductions are becoming more common.  I know that it has helped us being able to schedule help at home.

At this point, some of you might be wondering why I am blogging the birth of our child.  I got razzed at work from my boss saying something like, "Hey Hubbard, no blog?  This is 2008!  Get with the program."

We went in on January 16th thinking that we were going into labor.  We got to the labor and delivery room (LDR6) and the network connection in the room didn’t work.  They have a touch screen computer in each room on a boom, but it is severely crippled and all I could do is access Yahoo! email.  So I had to send an email out from my yahoo account (which I hadn’t used in many years).  Well, it turned out to be early labor (yes after 3 kids, you can still get fooled) and so we were sent home.  This time, we are in room LDR3 and the network connection is working just fine.  So this time I am able to blog!

9:52 AM  - She is 8 cm, 100% effaced, and 0 station.  Elaina will probably come soon (probably in the next hour).

10:22 AM - She is 10 cm, 100% effaced, and +1 station.  She is ready to push.  The nurse is calling the doctor.

10:46 AM - Elaina Grace Hubbard is born!  7 lb 14 oz, 20 1/2 inches.

Please feel free to leave a comment as part of our memory of this day.

What interested me the most was the Google Search Hotkey.  It would launch a browser with a search started at Google based on the contents of your clipboard.

Often, I will get an email (or some other type of text) that contains a referenced resource that doesn’t have a hyperlink, but is easily recognized based on the textual context.  The most common is a bug id or an email address.  Email programs will attempt to automatically hyperlink some well known formats like email addresses (which can be annoying at time if you don’t want it to be a hyperlink).

For a while, I have been using a set of cobbled together scripts that would search the contents of the clipboard for certain regular expressions, if one was found, it would launch an browser with an associated URL using matching substitutions from the regular expression.  Here are a few examples:

Name: Bugzilla
Pattern to match: (?:bug|scr)?[\s:#]*(\d+)
Navigate to: http://bugzilla.inin.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=\1

Name: Perforce
Pattern to match: (?:cl|change|changelist)[#:\s]+(\d+)
Navigate to: http://perforce.inin.com:8080/\1?ac=10

Name: Email Address
Pattern to match: ([A-Z0-9._%-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4})
Navigate to: mailto:\1

When I saw ClipX, I thought, "if only he could generalize the google search to allow regular expressions matches, then I could ditch my scripts and have multiple clipboards to boot."  I sent an email to the author of ClipX, Francis Gastellu, and he was very responsive.  Actually, by the next day he had released the Smart Navigation plugin to ClipX.

I was able to easily add the patterns that I had in my previous scripts.

He has a few Presets that are handy.  Actually the one that sold him on the idea was the Bugzilla pattern.

Editing the entry is straight forward.  The preview window is a really nice touch.  The boost regular expression syntax is used for the pattern matching.

For those fellow developers at Interactive Intelligence, I created an export of some common entries.  Please let me know if you know of other entries that would be helpful.

Did Jesus Die For Our Sins?

Well I found out that there is a option to Include insertion point movements in Undo list.  Thanks Sara Ford for the tip!

The SIP endpoints (most of the time a hard SIP phone) has its own configuration that has to be synchronized with configuration in our system.  This can be a huge pain point for our customers. 

My latest project at work has been managing the SIP endpoint configuration completely from our system’s configuration store.  This has include new configuration that used to be only needed for the phone.  There is also shared configuration that needs to be known by the phone and the server.

One of the simplifying assumptions was that a phone is only connected to one server.  In fact the phone can be connected to many servers (which show up a separate line keys) but that does not happen often in the field.  However it happens a lot in our office.  We may have a phone connected to our production server and several different test servers. 

This has been bugging me that I have made it much easier for our customers and at the same time made it difficult for our internal developers.  I have made some extensions that allow overrides to configuration to be done during development and out in the field (where there will inevitably be something that I messed up and some poor System Engineer has pull out some bubble gum and bailing wire to work around the problem until the next service update).

All the configuration for the phone is requested via HTTP.  I have been wanting to write a web application that aggregates complete configuration from multiple servers or just tacks on a few SIP registrations onto a current phone.  The problem is that I don’t write web applications.  I am a system level developer.  Writing any user interface code, especially admin interface, give me the hebejebees.

So I gave Ruby on Rails a try.  I have done some Ruby development in the past to the language was somewhat familiar.  I was very impressed by two key concepts of Rails: DRY and convention over configuration.  DRY stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself?every piece of knowledge in a system should be expressed in just one place.  And with convention over configuration, Rails has sensible default for just about every aspect of knitting together your application.  So there is dramatically less code to get this going.

To help me get going, I borrowed a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails and just looked around for examples.  It took me about 3 or 4 hours and I had a web application that was functional with an admin interface and a RESTful interface that returned XML in the format required by the phone.  The admin interface was one line of code which was very cool.  It was rudimentary but it got the job done (and it was going to be used by developers anyway).

In the end, the code didn’t smell right.  I showed it to one of my customers and he gave me some really good feedback that should help.  The neat thing about rails is that I have no qualm about just ditching what I did and start over from scratch since I didn’t have that much invested.  I can really see the benefit in Agile Development.

So tonight I bought my own copy of the book (you can buy the print and the PDF of the book together) and I am going through the PDF so that I can better understand how I should have put my app together.  This is going to be a nice tool to have in the toolbox.