Huttarances

Here’s wishing you and yours a very blessed Christmas. And may 2010 be full of God’s wondrous gifts to you!

I know we’re looking forward to the 4th day of Christmas! We get to experience the birth of our 4th baby girl! Please pray for us. The c-section will by at 7:30 am (central time) on Monday, December 28.

Blessings,
Kathy and Lars

Sherry has done it again and has a great giveaway for this week! Don’t miss out if you love hand-dyed threads and WorkBasket Magazines!

This post has been sitting in draft for months waiting for the rest of the pictures. So, here it is…

These are cards I made for a friend’s birthday. We’ll call these motifs 20-22.

This is part of a Christmas letter written to a few friends on December 18, 2008. We wanted to share it with anyone who might be reading.

With the Advent season well upon us, we are once again awed by having a newborn in our house. Somehow, having a new baby in the house at Christmas time makes the idea of the wonder of God becoming a baby all the more real. Amazing!

We are enjoying our new little Keziah, especially now that she is 6 weeks old and is starting to let Mommy sleep a bit more at night. She truly is a joy, and we are grateful that God has given us another opportunity to raise one of these little ones.

In thinking of God’s incarnation, we wanted to share with you the words of a parish priest in Ancash, Peru, when the Bible had been translated into the language of some of his parishioners: “For this reason we want to thank you, particularly in the name of all the Quechua speakers from north Conchucos, because Jesus has let us hear His voice in the language of the least and forgotten, renewing in our sight His preferential love for them. … As one joyfully expressed: ‘The Lord speaks for us in our Quechua!’”

God began cross-cultural missions, reaching out to us across an unbridgeable chasm, while we were dead in our sins… He translated his Word into human form and spoke to us in a language we could see and feel and understand personally. How exciting it is to have a part in completing that task, bringing His Word to each group of “the least and forgotten” in their own language!

Make your Stick Figure Family at FreeFlashToys.com

I made this weeks ago, but never got it posted. In case it isn’t obvious, since I have been told it isn’t, I’m expecting baby Huttar #4, so that is why Mom looks round. I’ll have to update this in a few weeks.

We’re all familiar with rounding… take a number and return the closest integer. Or round to N decimal places. E.g. round(116.729) => 117, or round(116.729) => 116.73.

But what if you want to round to a precision that varies with the scale of the number you start with? E.g. round(116.729) => 100, but round(9088) => 10000.

The reason this came up was in producing a graphical scale (a.k.a. bar scale) on a map, where the scale varies as you zoom in and out. At each zoom level, you’d like to display a bar showing how long 100 miles is… or 500 miles… or 2 miles. Whichever is most convenient for the user to read.

My initial implementation, based on Kelly Bigley’s, simply used a fixed size bar, and calculated the number of miles and kilometers that length represented on the map.

(Google Earth uses the same strategy, if you turn on the “scale legend.”) The drawback is that you have a bar labeled “5874 ft”, which is not very handy for eyeballing distances. You’d like it to show you how far 5000 ft or 1 km is. Given a distance number like 273 miles, or 0.06 miles, how do you compute the nearest round number on a similar scale?

I searched around for implementations of this in javascript, but couldn’t find anything. It’s probably not rare, but just hard to know how to search for it. Maybe if I post my solution here, (a) I’ll increase the next person’s chances of finding it (and that may be myself); and (b) someone will comment and tell me what this function is called and where to find a better implementation of it.

Here it is:
Continue Reading »

I’ve been interested for a while now in “magic” folding cubes, a.k.a. flip cubes. I started a screensaver project involving them, though it’s long lain dormant. The idea was (is) to display a rotating/folding cube using OpenGL, and use the 9 faces to show photos.

However, one problem with this common 2×2x2 foldcube is that the nine composite faces have aspect ratios that don’t match most photos. Six of the faces are square (2×2), and the other three have a 2/4 aspect ratio. So you end up with either large blank areas, or you cut off big chunks of the photos (typically heads and feet! :-), or you stretch them in unattractive ways.

So, can we do this kind of folding cube that has a 2/3 aspect ratio, which would fit (or much more closely approximate) the aspect ratio of portrait or landscape photos? I toyed a bit with the idea of a folding cube consisting of 2×3 subcubes. The question is, can they be hinged together in a way that allows folding so that all subfaces form suitable composite faces? Surprisingly, a suitable arrangement of hinges was pretty easy to find. It allows all 36 subfaces to be used in six 2×3 composite faces. Wow… I would have been happy with some 2×3 faces and some 2×2. But having all the subfaces uniformly incorporated into six faces of the ideal aspect ratio is better than I expected.

The only drawback of this 2×3 folding cube with respect to the 2×2x2 one is that it can’t (I don’t think) be folded “through”. That is, you can fold it “inward”, and you can fold it outward, but you can’t keep folding it outward repeatedly, and get back to where you started. Unless I’m wrong.

I won’t know for sure until I find some physical cubes to try it with. Maybe some alphabet blocks? Or maybe I need to cut some out of wood…

What would be really fun is to finish the above screensaver project, in such a way that the cubes and their hinges are configurable (ideally, at run-time). Then I could try different hinge configurations and see how well they work. Maybe even try a 2×2x3 shape! 12 subcubes, 72 subfaces; What sort of composite faces? I’m sure there could be two and maybe even four 4×3 faces…

Maybe now that O3D has been launched, I should take this opportunity to try out O3D as a convenient platform for 3D graphics. I don’t know though… as I look into O3D in some depth, it doesn’t look any more convenient than OpenGL. Plus, being browser-based, it probably won’t be able to do screensavers, nor read photos from a local folder. We’ll see…

We pray that President Obama and Vice President Biden fulfill the oaths of office they took using God’s Word and God’s name. Let us all pray for them and the whole administration to look to our Lord for wisdom and may the Lord of all creation protect them and their families.

Here is Albert Mohler’s prayer for President Obama. It is a great place to start.

I recently had the need to typeset a tilde in a TeX document… it happened to be part of a URL. As TeXies know, a straight tilde in a TeX file means a non-breaking space. So you have to escape it using backslash. But \~ means “put a tilde diacritic over the following letter.” So you have to separate it from the following letter using empty curly braces {}: \~{} (which looks like a pirate emoticon). But you still get a raised tilde, instead of the vertically-centered tilde that is now expected when showing computer data.

There were some helpful examples on the web, but they seemed to rely on a LaTeX package, url.sty, and we’re not using LaTeX. I tried adapting the code in url.sty to plain TeX, but I don’t know TeX and LaTeX well enough to do that. Finally I came across a page called Moving the tilda [sic] to the correct height for a url in latex, which ironically showed how to do it without LaTeX:

\def\urltilda{\kern -.15em\lower .7ex\hbox{\~{}}\kern .04em}

(This defines a macro called \urltilda, which is what you would use in the TeX code.) This macro didn’t quite work for me though, because if you’re following Chicago Manual of Style for line-breaking URLs (a whole ‘nother topic…), you will sometimes break a line right before a tilde… and if you also kern that tilde to the left, you get a line that starts to the left of where it should. So… as I don’t see a kerning problem with the tilde, I removed the \kern commands and just used the \lower command:

\def\urltilde{\lower .7ex\hbox{\~{}}}

I’m not sure whether or why the \hbox is necessary. In any case, the above \urltilde seems to work fine, and it’s relatively simple.

1) Recently I heard from my dad about an article in Times Online: As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God. The author, who grew up in Africa, makes the astonishing admission,

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

…

The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

Unlike “new atheists” Dawkins and Hitchens, who liken all religion to smallpox, Matthew Parris

Christianity…smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I’ve just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

I wonder how close this puts Matthew to conversion? Concluding that a belief system is beneficial for Africans doesn’t necessarily imply that its beliefs are true. It would suggest that Christianity would be beneficial for Matthew as well, but in this article he argues based on particular characteristics of African traditional culture, so he may not see the benefit as carrying over to himself.

We’ll see. We’ll pray. In any case, it’s amazing to me that a “confirmed atheist” gives so much credit to Christianity based on what he has observed in Africa. A lot of people talk (like Anthony Flew) about following the evidence where it leads; not so many are willing to do that when it leads contrary to their allegiances.

HT also to Pyromaniacs for the link.

2) Raving atheist blogger becomes Christian:

http://ravingatheist.com/2008/12/christ-is-the-lord/

3) Mortimer Adler - engaged in a “decades-long crusade against Darwinism”, and finally became a Christian at age 84.

For now: http://creationsafaris.com/crev200901.htm#fcsotm
If it’s gone, you could try here. http://creationsafaris.com/wgcs.htm

More in-depth: Dr Mortimer Adler’s life-long ‘crusade against evolution’

This is another blog post I started ages ago and am finally getting posted.

Lars made this cute little table for his nephew’s doll house. Nice and rugged for a boy!

I finished crocheting this rug in February just in time for us to move into our new bedroom!

Crocheted hotpad. Still working on making them square.

Crocheted washcloth. Ditto above.

These are two diaper cakes made for friends whose babies are now over a year old. Did I mention I started this post ages ago.

Since it is so cold out….

Tattingchic had a photo of her yummy sherbet on her blog a while ago. Here is my version which I made for my daughter a few months ago and am finally blogging.


I’m going to try to finish my challenge in the next 3 days. Most things are done, just need to blog them. Haven’t had extra time and energy for this lately with the baby coming. She’s worth it, though!

Powerful song for the Christmas season. Merry Christmas everyone!

O come, let us adore Him!

(Some other wordles I made: here. The ones in Swedish are by a different Lars.)

Great news — Kathy and Keziah were released from the hospital yesterday evening!

There has been a steady stream of step-by-step answers to prayer over the last three and a half days. See below for details. Again we appreciate those who have been praying us through.

We have 40 photos uploaded to our web gallery and no doubt will be adding more in the coming days.

… Your children [shall be] like olive plants
Around your table.

Psalm 128:3

How blessed we are to have this new little olive fruit!
The Lord is good… and his mercy endures forever.

Love,
Lars and Kathy
Anna, Jo and Keziah

Our third daughter, Keziah Ruth, was born yesterday at 1:16pm. She weighed 7 lbs even, and is 19″ long.

Kathy is doing fine, and was already up and walking a little, the morning after the C-section.

Kezzie has had some trouble transitioning to breathing air… not unusual for babies that are not full-term (she was 2.5 weeks early). So Keziah has been in the special care nursery. The pediatrician says she either has premature lung disease, or just needs to clear the fluid out of her lungs. Either way, she could be out of the nursery in a day or two. Righteous friends[1], we would appreciate your prayers for her.

We have some pictures posted in our November 2008 gallery album, and we will continue to add more there.

[1] I had a friend Peter N. who used to tell people not to pray for him, unless they were right with God. He figured that since the Scripture says “The prayer of the righteous man availeth much”, the prayer of the unrighteous was ineffective and possibly worse than no prayer at all.

Lars here, putting in my 2 cents’ worth on Come What May. (See Kathy’s post.)

I wanted to add that this film challenged, convicted, and encouraged me as a Christian. Although the plot centers around Roe v. Wade, abortion is not the main issue the characters wrestle with. Rather, doing what’s right is — come what may.

This is a simple message, but one that we need to be reminded of, and encouraged about. We are often told that our moral battles are losing battles, and that the wise thing to do is to compromise in order to obtain a shorter-term or a surer benefit. It’s not often enough that we see Christians modeling courageous decisions to do the right thing, however unpopular a position may be.

The story works out this principle in three radical ways that push against the flow of mainstream culture. Maybe they’re best expressed in Caleb’s closing narrative comment:

“My father was right. If you don’t believe your wife is precious, you won’t cherish her. If you don’t believe love is best when it’s pure and new, you won’t wait patiently for it. If you don’t believe the baby in the womb is the living handiwork of God, you’ll do nothing to protect it. What do you believe?”

I don’t feel like I can explain how the film presents these beliefs in a radical way, without diminishing its impact. Watch the trailers, and see if the film grabs your interest.

Lars and I watched this movie last night and highly recommend it. It tells a great story and explains the compelling arguments that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

The movie can be watched online for free probably for the next couple of days. They were wanting to extend the free screening past the original October 31 date, so hopefully it will still be showing at least until November 2. You can also purchase the movie, which would be well-worth the money.

In the meantime, enjoy the three trailers here. You can find out more about the Advent Film Group and the movie “Come What May” here.

Be sure to get out and vote God’s values! Prove those pollsters wrong!

To see other great Stoplight videos, go to www.citizenlink.org

The truth about Senator Obama’s voting record against babies born alive who have survived abortions.

If you have thought about voting for Senator Obama, think again.

Go to these websites to find out more:
http://BornAliveTruth.org/
http://www.citizenlink.org/dailybroadcast/A000008451.cfm