You know you've got a bunch of Mennonites together when the pastor spontaneously asks the church to sing "Jesus Loves Me" while the children walk up for their children's story. And, without music, everybody spontaneously breaks into beautiful 4-part harmony. It must be genetic or something.
It was a day of beautiful singing of hymns a week ago for Tabor Mennonite Church's centennial. It's hard to write about that weekend, in fact -- it was such a nice experience.
Sunday ended with opening the box sealed in the church's cornerstone back in 1965 when the current building was built. Rudy Schmidt, the person that sealed it up back then, was on hand to open it back up. They took out the stone and removed the box. Before the box was opened, Rudy told a story:
Back in 1965, I was the one to solder this box shut. While I was doing this, all of a sudden I smelled burning from inside. I figured I must have caught something inside on fire. I asked Jake Koehn (another person on the building committee) what to do. Jake said, "Nobody will ever see it again, just put it in." So let's open it!
I think Rudy has been wondering all these years whether he set it on fire or not.
The box was opened, and other than a few scorch marks on an envelope, was completely intact and in good shape. There was a copy of a local newspaper from 1965 with a headline about Goldwater, copies of programs of dedication for the new building and parsonage, a Bible, copies of the church constitution, and all sorts of other interesting things. To that we will add a copy of our centennial book (which I helped develop), CDs with recordings of our centennial activities, programs from the centennial celebration, and photos of the weekend.
Earlier on Sunday, we had a long but good worship service with sermons from two former pastors. The choir sang, including a
song commissioned for the occasion by
Larry Nickel. We got applause after that one (which happens occasionally, but not regularly, in our church). All the living former pastors, and the widow of one of them, served communion as well.
The service ended with the congregation singing
the "Mennonite Anthem". I think it was the most beautiful singing of that song I've ever heard. We had 352 people in church that day, and it seemed that not one person was going to let the moment go by without singing.
Saturday had started off with outdoor activities in the church park. There was old-fashioned soap making, remembering how church members used to store fat all year, then get together to make soap for use in their homes and to donate to the needy. There was rope making, wool spinning, and rides for the children. Under the tent, we had some great music the local Greenhorns band, and the former pastors all shared some memories and stories about their time here.
On Saturday evening, we had a meal and a drama -- and managed to somehow fit 321 people into the church basement for the meal. We think that's a record! The drama was written for the occasion by one of our members. John Gaeddert, a pastor here in the early 1970s, has become an expert wood carver in his spare time. He had carved a piece for us to celebrate the occasion, and presented it during the drama. That fit right in, because the drama was called "Bring Your Own Hedgepost" -- back in the early days of the church, each member was supposed to do just that so they would have a place to tie their horses.
Friday night was a lecture by
James Juhnke about our first paster, P. H. Richert, who was pastor for nearly 40 years. Quite entertaining and interesting.
I think the highlight of the weekend for me was getting to talk to some of the former pastors I never knew well. I had a few minutes to chat with John Gaeddert. I introduced myself, and he said, "Oh! I don't think I've met you, but I've heard your name a few times this weekend. You're on the centennial committee, right?" Yes indeed. I was born after he left this church, but he knew my grandparents -- which means he also knows exactly where we live. John and his wife Mary are both such warm and friendly people that it feels like I've known them much longer than a few days!
I got to chat with Jim Schrag too. He was pastor at Tabor until I was about 5 or 6. He didn't remember me specifically, but he was also interesting to talk with. He was one of the people that worked on a detailed history book in 1983 for the church's 75th anniversary. He told me that he processed most of the black and white photos for that book in a darkroom in his basement. I hadn't known that -- and mentioned I had found all those photos in the church archives and had scanned them all in. Jim requested a copy.
Terah found Lenore Waltner, wife of former pastor James Waltner, who passed away about a year ago. James had started his career as a pastor at Tabor, and ended it at College Mennonite Church in Goshen, IN, where Terah grew up. So she knew him, but I didn't. Terah introduced herself to Lenore, who seemed quite excited to make this sort of family connection!
And Brenda Martin Hurst, another former pastor, found Terah and introduced herself. Terah said that Brenda said something like, "Hi, I'm Brenda, and I don't think I know you!" These pastors all want to get to know everybody, I think!
While it's a protocol we all love to hate, and wish it would go away and
die a quiet death, sometimes someone has a good reason for supporting FTP.
(In my case, it's usually because that reason has a lot of money to
provide to my employer). But what if you want your FTP servers load
balanced (because downtime is for suckers)?
Obviously, you need to have some sort of shared filesystem behind all your
load balanced FTP servers, but that's a rant for another day (but let me
just say: if you're running GFS, especially on a busy site, may
$DEITY have mercy on your soul).
Because of the silly random port games that FTP likes to play, it's not a
trivial job to load balance an FTP service amongst multiple hosts. You
can't just throw a round-robin on port 21 and hope to get anything useful
going.
Ironically, while "active" FTP is a pain in the arse for most people, it's
a lot easier to load balance, because the initial connection comes in on a
well-known port which can be load-balanced, while all the other "random"
connections are server-initiated and your standard routing/NATing/whatever
you're doing for outgoing connectivity should be able to handle it.
However, passive FTP is a bigger pain. The problem is pretty simple to
understand -- the FTP client will want to connect to a high port on the
"virtual" (load-balanced) IP, and without serious traffic sniffing, your
load balancer won't be able to map that incoming connection on port 54321
to the real server that actually wanted the connection.
The solution, thankfully, is fairly straightforward. You allocate a range
of high ports (maybe a thousand or so) to each real server, with a
different port range for each real server. You then tell the load
balancer to send all traffic for each range of ports to the corresponding
real server, and then configure that real server to put all it's passive
connections into that port range (I'm fairly sure most FTP servers can
support that bit of config).
So, unfortunately, you can no longer disallow FTP support on the basis
that you can't load balance it. No shortage of other reasons, though.
Some drivers in Linux include "firmware" - code that runs on the device the
driver deals with, not the main processors in the system. Most of this is in a
binary or equivalent form, which is probably not the form that it was
originally written in. This makes it non-free by Debian's standards, an issue
which has led to much argument around previous releases and has blown up once
again.
The good news is that kernel developers are making a continuing effort to
separate this from the driver code. I've collected together the patches that
do this and written 2 of my own, which appear to cover all the remaining
sourceless firmware. But I was only able to test one of these drivers (radeon)
- the rest is up to you.
Affected drivers
I've been meaning to fix 
update:
One of my readers, Florian, sent this nice bit, which I have not read before:
“I read your blog via Planet Debian and immediately felt reminded of Jane
I just published new Gammu testing version. Major changes are in handling some
special Nokia responses, handling of Siemens phonebook entries and
introduction of automatic testing using CDash on
This will be my last post on the topic of 
Sometimes, I m becoming really pestered by the number of issues, especially hardware issues, that remain prominent in the Linux system after so many years. And I m convinced that one of the root causes is the kernel development model. While far to be the only one, you understand a lot when you have a look at it.
The stable API nonsense
To explain the development model, the kernel documentation contains a document written by Greg Kroah-Hartman called 
Digi released a new beta release of the dgap drivers a couple of days ago, notably fixing the build issue (TTY flip buffer) with newer kernels.
They now ship two versions of the driver, one suitable for 2.4 and 2.6 kernels up to and including 2.6.26, and one for kernels 2.6.27+. The appropriate version will be picked up automatically when the module is built, of course.
APT source line, unchanged: