My Wushu Blog

Another awesome class of basics with Mark.

I like the basic wushu movements now more than ever, for two reasons.

1. I’m so out of it now, I can’t remember an entire form, so its all I can do.
2. If you can do basics well, then all of the rest comes a lot easier. Its something we should always work on.

What I also like are little combination, you know, not a full section, but just a short string of punches, kicks, and stances. I’ve always been very self-conscious about my ability to pick up new forms and movements, where I’ve seen people (Mark for example) learn a new form in 1 hour and repeat it. I can’t, and the few times I’ve tried my brain and body become so exhausted I probably couldn’t remember my own name, let along a series of complex movement with a fighting application. So, little combo’s work for me, it lets me work on my muscle memory, and it doesn’t burn me out.

I’m just very happy that while Mark is back teaching, we’ll have to oppertunity to work on that stuff on a more regular basis.

I help up pretty good tonight, and I got though all the jumps too, and I sure miss doing all of those. Once Mark asked people to break into groups, Patti asked if I wanted to box with her and James. Well of course!

James alternated between the two of us, going through some simple drills and then “sprints”, which tired both of us out. Patti joked around and said she liked how good I looked in the pink gloves. Look… those gloves stick out like a sore thumb in the bin, and I couldn’t find any other 12oz gloves. I should bring mine from home when I come on Thursdays, cause they’re super manly! They have curse words on them, and their all black, shit, they even have chest hair on them! And Tattoo’s! Yeah, they’d make those pink gloves squeel and run away… but they would totally be intrigued cause they are so bad ass.

Okay, enough of that. We did that until 9 or so. It may not be obvious, but both the trainer (James) and the participant (Me) get a great workout, its really hard holding those target pads and time everything. James is always a great sport with me.

When it was about 9:15 I had to cut out. Mark was still drilling everyone pretty hard (CMAT is coming up again) so I said goodnight and came home to blog, and eat a potato!

I’ve configured this blog to use my OpenID accounts. I have two (which totally goes against the single identity mindset of OpenID )

• http://mcarlson.myopenid.com/
• http://openid.evil-genius-network.com/mike

The second one I just stood up today. I’m always concerned with who has my information, and if I can, I try to keep it all within the realm of my control. Also, the evil genius domain has absolutely no purpose besides a testing ground that I have no problems destroying

Using my own OpenID service is attractive, most of all its a fun exercise. Lets go through what I did (so one day I can remember).

The easiest part was finding an OpenID server. A quick google search brought me here:

http://wiki.openid.net/Run_your_own_identity_server

The hard part was deciding which one I should use. I actually tried out 4 of them, phpMyID, Masquerade, DjangoID, and finally, Java OpenID Server. I got three of them running, and in the end I simply settled on JOS. For now. I had a lot of fun building a MCV app in both Ruby on Rails and Django. I’ve been on a MCV kick, as a month ago I got pretty excited about Ruby on Rails. The big part where I shy away from Django or RoR is integrating things into Apache. With Java, I have Tomcat, and I’ve used it before so I have an immediate comfort level with it. I did have to ask Chris for a little bit of help when it came to the mod_jk stuff.

First thing was to go over the JOS documentation. I knew I would need the following:

• Java App Server – I decided to use Apache’s Tomcat 6.0
• A database – PostgreSQL 8.3
• JCalendar, this was simple, as the readme pointed me to one

Over the years, I’ve always used MySQL. It’s simple, light, and all the new fancy “Web 2.0″ site use it. I’m considering making the switch to PostgreSQL for two reasons. 1) Sun seems to be mishandling the QA and release engineering of MySQL . 2) Recent benchmarks with FreeBSD 7.1 and PostgreSQL have been phenomenally good, and even though I’m not running a big site with millions of visitors I do like to keep up with whats current and performs well.

Second, I built the required applications and enabled both tomcat and PostgreSQL in /etc/rc.conf. Think of rc.conf as a simple text-based chkconfig, except with rc.conf, you can specify additional command arguments, profile environment, and anything else the application might support. I like the ease of the chkconfig/service system works in Linux, but FreeBSD’s run command (rc) system is very flexible and easier to tune.

> sudo su -
$ cd /usr/ports/databases/postgresql83-server
$ make install
$ echo 'postgresql_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
$ cd /usr/ports/www/tomcat6
$ make install
$ echo 'tomcat60_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
$ cd /usr/ports/databases/postgresql-jdbc
$ make install

I could have simply added pre-built packages with “pkg_add -r tomcat6 postgresql83-server postgresql-jdbc” but I like seeing what compile time options are available, and then setting those. Hurray for the flexibility of FreeBSD!

One thing that you have to do with PostgreSQL (that you don’t have to do with MySQL) is initialize the database/config:

$ initdb /usr/local/pgsql/data
$ su - pgsql
> createdb jos-openid
> makepasswd --chars=13
 a nice 13 character random string
> createuser josuser -P
> psql jos-openid 

Welcome to psql 8.3.6, the PostgreSQL interactive terminal. Type:
        \copyright for distribution terms
        \h for help with SQL commands
        \? for help with psql commands
        \g or terminate with semicolon to execute query
        \q to quit

jos-openid=# select * from pg_user;
  usename | usesysid | usecreatedb | usesuper | usecatupd |  passwd  | valuntil | useconfig
 ---------+----------+-------------+----------+-----------+----------+----------+-----------
  pgsql   |       10 | t           | t        | t         | ******** |          |
  josuser |    16386 | t           | f        | f         | ******** |          |
(2 rows)
jos-openid=#

Next, I had to unpack the war file and modify the jdbc.properties to use PostgreSQL

jar -xvf jos-webapp-1.2.0.war .
...
jar -cvf /usr/local/tomcat6/webapps/ROOT.war .

Yeah, after configuring the app and zipping it back up, I called it ROOT, it was a lot easier this way. I didn’t want to manage multiple java apps at this point. I can be a very lazy admin

After starting both Tomcat and PostgreSQL up, I now had a working web app running on my server at port 8180. The last part is to mount the java application inside of apache. For that, I needed to install mod_jk:

$ cd /usr/ports/www/mod_jk
$ make install

Thats the easy part of installing mod_jk, the next parts are the worker.properties file, modifying httpd.conf, and then modifying my virtualhost configuration for the domain evil-genius-network.com. I also added a record for openid.evil-genius-network.com. So, in that order, this is what I did:

/usr/local/etc/apache2/worker.properties:

workers.tomcat_home=/usr/local/apache-tomcat6.0
workers.java_home=/usr/local/jdk1.6.0
ps=/
worker.list=localhost
worker.tomcat.type=lb
#worker.tomcat.balanced_workers=localhost
#worker.loadbalancer.local_worker_only=0
worker.localhost.port=8009
worker.localhost.host=localhost
worker.localhost.type=ajp13
worker.localhost.lbfactor=1

/usr/local/etc/apache2/httpd.conf:

LoadModule jk_module libexec/apache22/mod_jk.so
# mod_jk
JkWorkersFile /usr/local/etc/apache22/workers.properties
JkLogFile  /var/log/jk.log
JkShmFile  /var/log/jk-runtime-status
JkLogLevel error

/usr/local/etc/apache2/virtualhosts/evil-genius-network.com (in the openid.evil-genius-network.com VirtualHost section):

JkMount /* localhost

Then, I restarted apache:

$ /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache2 restart

Now, have my own little OpenID server running at http://openid.evil-genius-network.com/

BTW, I had to re-edit EVERY pre section of this page about 6 times, that was the least-fun part of all of this.

A fantastic novel. This type of book makes re-examine yourself, which can be good and bad I guess.

The book is essential about two cousins, Sam Klayman (or Sam Clay) and Joseph Kavalier, who decided to pitch a new line of comic book characters during the 1940′s “Golden Age” of comic books. They both bring their own ideals and messages to their fictional characters. What I found interesting is this isn’t about a particular event, but the two characters lives in whole. Sam spends a good portion of his life avoiding who he really is, while Joe relentlessly tries to bring his family back from war-torn Prague and eventually gets involved with WWII himself.

This wasn’t the kind of book I would have picked up on my own. I was apprehensive even after reading the back cover, but since James had highly recommended it, I went for it. All the dialog is great, its hard to imagine one person coming up with all of that, especially since all the characters are frustratingly human.

It is hard to say that I’ve enjoyed a novel that was sad and depressing. It was a great read, and I really liked how the dialog was arranged, it was very sparse but not at all wasteful.

The book is about a father and son traveling to the pacific coast in a very dreary post-apocalyptic south western. I guess this is all supposed to be after a comet hits the Earth. They are both constantly scrounging for food, trying to stay warm, and hiding from marauders, cannibals, thieves… lots of nasty things. I couldn’t put it down though, and I was always looking for the little happy bit here and there, which are few and far between.

The book left me with such an impression that I immediately wanted to share it, so I gave it to Summer, and by Sunday her only comment was “Mike, you need to read happier books…”

I also found out, as the cover of my edition states, it is currently being made into a movie that will probably premier this year at the Cannes Film Festival. The authors ( Cormac McCarthy) previous book, No Country for Old Men, gained a lot of buzz (from me too, I thought that movie was great) last year. Don’t, you know, take your grandma to see it when it comes out.