News - Holemans

Converted the Holemans - Hidden Art page which expresses art in some way because we are created in the image of the great artist, the Creator God to Tailwind CSS. This makes the page easier to maintain by using the structure of the other pages on the site. Also, brings the look and feel to match those existing Tailwind CSS based pages.

Additionally, it uses a small script to generate the page from a file with text entries for the category, title, text and notes regarding each image. Was able to completely redo the presentation w/o touching a bit of the XML data for the content.

Converted the Holemans - History page which is a summary of '20 and earlier activities, assignments, projects along with client organization and scope to Tailwind CSS. This makes the page easier to maintain by using the structure of the other pages on the site. Also, brings the look and feel to match those existing Tailwind CSS based pages.

The Holemans home page center column and the right menu would overlap. While it appeared to me to be the right menu that was not segmenting the lines to fit, it was actually the center column that was overflowing the right menu. Added a Tailwind CSS overflow-x-auto class which creates a horizontal scroll bar for the center column as needed when zoom level is increased significantly or the screen size is real small. Most people are using their phone for web browsing. With the home page being the entry page for our info, this was an important 'weed' to address.

Across all of the Holemans web site pages, converted all image files from .gif, .jpg & .png formats to the smaller .webp format along with their references. This produces quicker loading times because of the smaller file sizes.

In the Advisory Team section of the About Us - Holemans page, the e-mail addresses use the Tailwind CSS font-mono class to empasis that they are literal data. This fixed width font have wider letters and the e-mail address has segements that do not contain word breaks which make wrapping in tight spaces harder. I had used the text-sm class to reduce the size. Adding the font-thin & tracking-tighter classes helped but there was still the wrapping did not break on a long address like interlinkcwholemaniii.com causing overlap onto the next entry. I had some misconceptions on the word break aspects of CSS because I had thought that the menu in right hand column of the Holemans page was the cause of the overlap by the center column. This led me to wrongly think about how the word break actually worked. Revisiting the word break choices I found the break-all class which with the other changes makes the e-mail addresses breaking work more to my likely. With this improvement I do not know of any significant defects in the presentation of the site now.

• Engage others in advancing the ministry as they can be involved in various ways.
• Conversion of Holemans web site to Tailwind CSS has introduced new bugs to fix, AKA weeds.

Started the conversion of Holemans web site to Tailwind CSS. The existing site used a number of old style HTML techniques which do not play well nor work easily with both computer screen and mobile phone sized screens. Tailwind CSS uses a collection of classes allowing one to manage style directly in the HTML code without needing Javascript in many places. It reduces the browser specific needs making the page sources much cleaner and easier to maintain.

These Holemans web site (julianlocals.com) pages have been converted:

• Holemans home page
• About Us - Holemans
• News - Holemans which is this page right here

One of the ministries which we support is Ramona Pregnancy Care Clinic (RPCC), in Ramona, CA, which is about a thirty minute drive from our mountain town. RPCC provides support for women and families in crisis pregnancies in Ramona and the back country of San Diego County, including Julian and environs. This support includes pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, and counseling. You can find more of their mission statement or other information at Friends of RPCC.

Each year, there are two major fund raising events to keep the doors open; a Walk for Life in the spring, and a banquet in the fall. Every year, I, Marilyn, participate in their Walk for Life, getting sponsors for the 2.4 mile Walk. Covid caused a "Virtual" walk last year, where we walked on our own, and a shortened, one mile Walk this year.

Due to Covid this year, I raised $2400--from my living room! I was not able to see all of the people I typically do, so my donations were not as good as previous years. I was pleasantly surprised, then, by this year's amazingly successful Walk--the 27th annual. Last year's Walk for Life had been the best yet, bringing in $50,000. The goal this year was to match that $50,000, but this goal was exceeded by being nearly doubled, for a total to date of $96,100! All praise and glory to God!

This is approximately the 19th Walk I've participated in. Each year, I ask just about every one around me if they would like to sponsor me for the Walk. I have had very positive responses to my requests, from people near and far, from very generous donations down to the literal widow's mite-- no amount is insignificant in God's sight.

It is a pleasure to work with these dedicated women and men who keep the Clinic open, serving women and families in crisis.

I just realized that our website does not have an explicit link for donating to/via Interlink Ministries. So, I have added a Donate entry to both our site navigation bar and the footer. Until we complete the probationary period, we are not listed in the Interlink Ministries Missionaries page, which was a little unexpected.

After upgrading to the latest version of Lubuntu, I was able to resume the path of installing a self-hosted Scrum management app. I tried working on Open Project management software. I was unable to use it successfully. I began to review my efforts with Restyaboard. It turns out that I was using a free trial version which had limits, like only one user. The free self-hosted version allows 10 users. Yeah! I have installed it and it looks reasonable enough so far.

With the functionality covered, there is the need to deal with networking issues for team user access. Please pray for wisdom and success in dealing with this.

I made the decision to switch from the Lubuntu flavor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution to Xubuntu. This involved refiguring out how each system was set up. One of the areas involved the default file manager, screen grabber and the image viewer that came with Xubuntu. They were missing features that made the Lubuntu apps work better for us. After installing Xubuntu, I managed to install the Lubuntu apps and that seemed to address that area of change. I tracked the details of the installs and upgrades on all three of our systems. With the changes all seemed fine, and we were settling in on the new Xubuntu environment. Then, we found that when switching users (which we only normally do on the most powerful system which is used for the server software) that the Lubuntu apps had brought along a bunch of session software that was in conflict with the Xubuntu version. This lead to another, less than happily made decision, going back to just an upgraded release of Lubuntu. After completing this, all three systems are now on the most recent release of Lubuntu.

There were minor inconsistencies in user names and user & group id numbers between the systems. Not being an administrator expert, the most reliable solution to correcting the variations w/o spending even more excess time researching all of the little details, was to do a fresh install over the offfending system's just-done install. This was so we would not be building more upon the boo boos. Not a fun sequence, as it impacts the actual work trying to be done on it. The weeds kept getting in the way. It is not natural to thank God for the hassles while in them.

Doing all of this, while having to deal with the variations between the hardware of the different systems, added another layer. The operating system and GUI attempt to make the work environment be the same, covering over the hardware details that vary. Additionally, there have been changes in PC boot sequences and firmware that add to the complexity. The history of the home computer BIOSes means either just trusting the Linux distribution's handling of these or becoming more involved in another level of detail which becomes unneeded after the install. The little bit of knowledge is then not touched upon again until the next change in hardware systems, if then even. There was a point in one system's install sequence where the selection of the SSD & harddrive partiitons had to be designed and selected. The default simple solution kept not functioning, requiring me to make detailed choices w/o expertise. The path each of the times was not the one I wanted to choose but, again did not want to chase down another tangential road of limited knowledge about BIOS and boot sequences. The handy 'If the hardware does not work neither do I' quote does not help when there is no IT department to clean up the messes.

With the other issues cleaned up I did not want to try and address something else that was odd with the boot sequence but there was another of these 'tiny' infractions in the consistency of the user ids that would be best fixed now not later. I did another install and for reasons I do not know, the partioning option for the simple configuration worked for the first time on this system. Also, this cleaned up the bizarre boot sequence. It fixed what was likely to be a future problem with limited boot parition space, also. Sometimes it is possible to actually see the benefit of an 'unrelated' problem causing a good in the longer term even w/o our lame skill set being the director. Why it still is hard to always give thanks in all things, is a mystery.

The main rationale for these upgrades was that the systems had kind of aged with many changes which were never noted. The fresh installs were done to document exactly what apps and configuration customization are being used. Now I think I can resume the path of installing a self-hosted Scrum management tool in a more stable manner, which is what provoked the system upgrades to begin with.

T.J. was a third grader in my class at Rift Valley Academy in Kijabe, Kenya. He lived with his family on RVA's lower campus. Both of his parents are veterinarians, but they weren't in Kenya as vets, at least not when I got to know them in 2016. They worked down in the Rift Valley, about a thirty minute drive, in a town called Maai Mahiu.

Maai Mahiu is a truck-stop town located on the Trans-African highway that spans from Lagos, Nigeria, in West Africa to Mombasa, Kenya, in East Africa. The semi-arid region around Maai Mahiu has no major sustainable industry, with a majority of local commerce carried out through small roadside businesses that cater to long-haul truckers and other drivers passing on the highway. Prostitution, drugs, cheap alcohol, pornography, and inexpensive lodging make Maai Mahiu a popular overnight stop for weary truckers. Poverty is stifling, and malnutrition is common for local people, especially since a lack of consistent rain prevents optimal crop yields in the area. The transient male population, AIDS and other diseases, and family violence leave children homeless, hungry, and orphans.

That's where Naomi's Village comes into the story, and where TJ's parents worked. Naomi's Village is a fully registered children's home providing complete care for total orphans, located near Maai Mahiu. Founded in 2011, they have since rescued over 90 children, including abandoned babies and those left parentless by terrorist attacks, AIDS, disasters, and domestic violence. The plans they have for these children and their futures are part of a remarkable undertaking, a call of God, to one day see the comforting of a vast wound on the heart of African humanity. They provide these children with education, having started both a preschool and Cornerstone Preparatory Academy, proper nutrition, healthcare and spiritual care.

TJ's mom, Anji, worked as the Child Sponsorship Coordinator, seeking sponsors to help these vulnerable children. His dad, Steve, was the Director of Cornerstone's Community Development Program--improving the lives of the parents of the community children who attended Cornerstone Academy by teaching them business and farming skills.

All of that was partially made possible because TJ and his siblings were in classes at, and part of the community of, Rift Valley Academy while his parents were working. TJ was in my class because, as a prayer supporter for another missionary family working at RVA, I had read their newsletter telling of an urgent need for a temporary third grade teacher for one term, and answered that need. I was able to meet that need because others provided monetary and prayer support for us and allowed us to go to Kenya.

So the censorship has extened to Amazon and their servers where they have shut down parler.com. gab.com meets similar needs to Parler but since they host their sites on their own servers they are outside of the reach of Amazon or similar cloud services to just cut them off. Though they have had some slow responses, Gab has been adding to their server farm to address the demand of millions of new accounts and increased traffic. Additionally, Mozilla is threatening shut downs, so I have moved off of Firefox to the Gab browser Dissenter. It is a real blessing that Gab went through this conflict a few years ago so they have been working on meeting the need before it came to pass.

As we are starting, we need to make choices on how to manage our work. There are a number of systems: email, contact manager, campaign management, source code control, scrum management, social media and web hosting. All of these have cloud-based service providers with easy to use entry points for deployment. The shocking step of shutting off access to social media, application stores and web browsers by many tech giants this week is an indicator that service-based technologies will likely not be available for those not part of the "woke left". The free side is being isolated. We depend upon You. We just realize it more now. Give wisdom on the technical solutions for handling our infrastructure. Raise up incredible works for Your glory.

#BlackOutFriday, where social media went beyond just flagging or censoring the President's posts to shutting down his accounts, was the straw that broke the camel's back to move me to take action. Facebook threatens me that if I continue to just reference the parler.com website in any more posts -- they will silence me. I have moved all of the old posts of #9pmMinute off Facebook onto julianlocals.com/9pmMinute. New postings will be found on gab.com (#9pmMinute). Additionally, I am downloading other content from Facebook, in case they delete my account and pages.

First pass at creating a Facebook post graphic for Ergatas.org. Being the first time I have used the tools for this, there were some bumps. C.W.Holeman III gave me a remote custom tutorial on "photoshopping" using the free Linux graphics editor, GIMP. Now I can do more than just rotate, crop & scale an image. You can help support missionaries through Ergatas by Sharing or Liking the Facebook post. Not sure what Ergatas is? See more on the Ergatas About Page.

I came across a computer programming coding problem website, Kattis. They have little samples to code. You pick the programming language you want to write your solution in. I am focusing on C++ & Kotlin these days. They start off really simply and progress in complexity. I have decided to do one each day to keep in practice and to pick up new skills. Specifically, I am going to code using C++20. Additionally, I will be adding a requirement for myself to use functional programming methods rather than imperative.

Our primary rationale for wanting to join Interlink Ministries was to make it easier for other ministries who do not know us to perceive us as legit. We have been accepted by Interlink Ministries. As we are taking the first steps to go public with this, we ask for the doors to clearly open -- or shut just as clearly.

I am researching to find a project/task management tool to use for keeping track of tasks whether they be technical programming issues or just things to do, such as publishing the week's newsletter. I would like it to easily support the Scrum software development methodology.

A batch of lightly buttered Naan was made, packaged and delivered for the final Sunday morning meeting of 2020. We "attend" via Facebook video. Marilyn requested that they not terminate the feed at the instant the service is over but rather leave the camera on to allow the people who are present to be seen. So, not only the pastor and worship team were visible but many of the people.

Tim Young is a missionary on the Ergatas.org website. He started LightSys, which provides IT consulting, training, software development, and missions mobilization, to equip missions and missionaries. One of their projects was to have student interns develop apps for mission organizations. It is an Android app requested by Siberian missionaries working with the Evenki people in Russia. The Evenki language is quickly dying. The app promotes language learning for children whose heart language is Evenki. Presenting the gospel in their heart language is the next step. .

I was contacted by one of our Advisory Team Kevin Horan. He is developing a website, Ergatas.org for connecting the Church with missionaries. He asked me to do testing on the beta version. I was able to give him a number of editoral comments. Kevin is one of the few people who can handle a heavy dose of my technical opinions in a rather positive manner.
The website is ready. You can also see their Facebook page.