Our Principals

1) Honor before all else. 
2) The difference between a winner and a loser is that the winner tried one more time. 
3) K.I.S.M.I.F. 
4) Y.C.D.B.S.O.Y.A. 

Our Web Page:

http://www.venturingbsa.com

E-Mail Us!

Our Creed

Exploring: Enthusiasm, Energy, & Excellence 

Venturing Crew 369

Venturing Crew 369 was chartered on December 31, 1994 to the Reformation Luthern Church. 

Venturing Crew 369 specializes in UNIX for Programmers while emphasizing a deep theme of Engineering Computer Information & Science;

Membership in Venturing Crew 369 is open to young men and women between the ages of 14 [and in high school] and not yet 20.  Annual Membership fees are $25.00. 

Calendar of Events:

7/4/00  No Meeting

7/11/00  Book Making Meeting #2

7/27-30/00  Gettysburg Trip $50.00

9/10/00  Court-of-Honor at Park

9/12/00  Open House Dress Rehearsal

9/19/00  Open House [First Nighter]

9/22-23/00  Emergency First Aid Course, Part A

9/29-30/00  Emergency First Aid Course, Part B

10/8/00  Bike Hike, Granville

10/13-15/00  Book Binding Campout [Exchange Lodge]

10/24/00  Pizza Party

11/4/00  VOA Elections and Annual Banquet

11/12/00  Church Dinner [We Cook]

12/15/00  Silver Beaver Apps Due

12/16/00  St. Stevens Food Drive

12/19/00  Christmas Party

12/26/00  No Meeting

02/03/01  Court-of-Honor, Pot-Luck, Sleep Over

02/04/01  Scout Sunday

07/1-7/01  Summer Camp

07/23-/01  National Scout Jamboree

11/02/01  VOA Elections and Annual Banquet

Quote of the Month

Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee: he shal never suffer the righteous to be moved.

Garage Sale

It was extremely early on a Friday Morning. I went to Mr. Drake's home to pick him up and then to rent a truck. This was no ordinary truck. This was the longest truck one could get without flexing in the middle. From there it was out to Renyoldsburg and to the Church to drop things off. Then to Gahanna, and to the Church. To Clintionvile, and to the Church. To Upper Arlington, and to the Church. Around 7:00pm the youth showed up to help price all of the donated "Stuff?" 2:00am it was off to bed. 6:00am (up an adam) set up the yard. The best part of the garage sale is not the money, but the education the youth learns about responsibility and self reliance!

Up-an-Coming Member Expenses

Open House

This was the first time that the Adults turned the open house (membership drive) 100% over to the youth. It was their job to contact the high schools and colleges, hang flyers, do demonstrations, contact the youth, meet with those that RSVPed one-on-one, guarantee the number of youth in attendance, etc...

A good open house takes about two months to plan. There are speeches to write and a years program to plan, all in advance. The appearance of the room and the computers are of the smallest importance incomprehension to the belly-to-belly conversations with new prospects.

As a great man once taught me: "Sell the sizzle not the stake!" Be strong! You have what they need! They need you! They need what you have! Find their dream and fullfil. Riches come from empowering others, not by climbing over them!

It is your excitement and enthusiasm in the "product" that will make the differences between success and failure!

Great Site

Really great site. I think the biblical reference pages, links to religious organization's scouting divisions, and overall commitment to integrating God into your unit speaks volume about the quality of your crew. We are currently developing a site and your site is really a "model" to shoot for. It shows that over time masterpieces can be made.

Keep up the awesome web work!

Flag Retirement Ceremony

I'm Cubmaster for Pack 707, here in Brea, California -- a little town roughly ten miles northeast of Disneyland.

Tonight, we performed the flag retirement ceremony described at:

http://www.www.venturingbsa.com/scouting.d/flag.d/flag.retire.html

The ceremony was mostly executed by Webelos and Bears, who read the parts about the stripes and presented said stripes to the adult in charge of the fire.

After the ceremony was over, a handful of parents told me they were pleased by the introductory explanation of flag retirement (the only part read by adults). And they were moved by the patriotic emphasis of the dialog as the stripes were being presented for burning.

So! Thank you all for sharing a wonderful flag retirement ceremony.

Part II memory performance

You will remember from last month we discussed the process queue information from vmstat. This month we're going to look at the virtual memory subsystem and memory management. Proper memory performance can be the single largest bottleneck on a system. Real system memory, RAM, generally runs somewhere between 10 and 100 nanoseconds (nano = 10**-9), whereas swap space, hard drives, performs around 9 to 15 milliseconds (milli = 10**-3).

Let's first look at the two columns under the heading "memory": "swap" and "free". These titles are not really very descriptive and could conceivably be confusing. At first glance you might think that "swap" means the amount of swap space the system has and "free" means how much swap space is available. In actuality, "swap" means the amount of free swap space available in kilobytes, and "free" means the amount of free physical memory available in kilobytes. If either of these numbers is too large, or too small, it is an indication of a machine that is not optimally tuned. In a well tuned system, free physical memory should be somewhere around 5-10% of the installed memory and free swap should be close to 100% of the configured swap space.(1) This ensures that the system isn't overconfigured, and that performance isn't degraded by having to rely on swap.

Referring to last month's article and the sample vmstat run, swap shows around 230MB of free swap and between 2MB and 5MB of free RAM. Based on our rules above, we can be reasonably assured that this system is misconfigured in some way. There is either too much swap or not enough memory. To find out which, we'll have to dig a little deeper using the next set of columns.

Now, let's look at the "page" statistics, which tell about the operation of the memory management system and the page scanning daemon. All the following statistics are displayed on an average per second:

• · re - the number of pages "reclaimed" by a process. If a page has not been accessed during a period of time, it is marked as a candidate to be paged out and reused. A page is reclaimed by a process if it has been marked, but not yet paged out.
• mf - the number of "minor faults". A minor fault happens when a process requires a new page of memory but doesn't have any available to it. The process requests a page from the freelist.
• pi - the number of "page ins". A page in happens whenever a process needs something that resides on disk, ither its object code to run or some data from a file, to be transferred into memory.
• po - the number of "page outs". A page out happens when a process has not used a page of memory for an amount of time. At this point, the memory manager marks the page as reusable, and copies the data to disk, and places it in the free list. The page still contains the data, and can be reclaimed by the original owner (see above).
• fr - the number of pages "freed" by the paging daemon. This is the rate at which pages are being placed on the free list. A page is placed on the free list by the memory manager, either when it hasn't be accessed recently or when a process terminates.
• de - This number refers to the anticipated short-term memory "deficit". Generally, a memory deficit is considered a very bad problem. The system is telling you that it doesn't have enough pages free to fulfill the memory requests it is receiving and has to quicken the rate at which it adds to the free list.
• sr - this is the "scan rate", the rate at which the memory manager is scanning memory to replenish the free list. A low scan rate means the system has sufficient memory to handle the system load, processes are ending (hence being freed) quickly enough that the free list never falls below its minimum value. A high scanning rate (generally considered to be above 200 pages/second, sustained over a period of time) means the memory manager is having to steal pages from processes that may need them. Combined with a high reclaim rate, this can show a major problem.

As with the process queue statistics from last month, it is easy to see how the memory management statistics can tell a wealth of information about the system, and help locate possible performance problems. Armed with this data, we can then turn to other tools (which we'll discuss later) to accurately determine the exact problems, and find resolutions.

Bob's Kingdom By: Daniel Morris

June 27, 2000

Your Site

You have a great site with nice clipart. I have spent about an hour just going through your Bible information. How inspiring!

Take care and God Bless!

Clusters - The Flat Neighborhood Network

Recently I read an article at ArsTechnica about the KLAT2 cluster ( http://www.arstechnica.com/cpu/2q00/klat2/klat2-1.html ). The KLAT2 cluster reduced the cost per GFLOP from $10,000 for traditional supercomputers ( $3,000 for a Beowulf normal cluster ) down to $650/GFLOP. How did they do this?

Well for a start each computer is about $500 ( 750Mhz Athlons, 128MBs RAM, and no harddrive ( because of netboot ) ). A lot of the problem with normal clusters is bandwidth. One solution would be a 1,000 Mb ethernet, but that costs almost $1,000 per computer! The other would be to have multiple 100Mb ethernet cards, which can very often offer more bandwidth than Gigabit ethernet, but there again you run into a problem with the switches. With the normal tree organization of switches a lot of the signals have to go through multiple switches to get to other computers. This Creates a lot of lag.

The solution they came up with was the The Flat Neighborhood Network (FNN). This is a solution where every computer can connect to each other through only 1 switch for example:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Computer 1  Computer 2  Computer 3  Computer 4  Computer 5  Computer 6  
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 to:A&B      to:A&B      to:A&C      to:A&C      to:B&C      to:B&C     
----------------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------
switch A  switch B  switch C  
----------------------------

So if Computer 1 wanted talk to Computer 3 it would go through switch A, if Computer 1 wanted to talk to Computer 5 it would go through switch B, etc. So on a small scale this is easy enough to figure out, but as the system gets larger it gets almost impossible to do it by hand. So the KLAT2 crew wrote a program that designed the entire wiring system and then they implemented it. This reduces both cost and delay. This combined with the implementation of the Athlons internal parallelism (3DNow!) this reduced the cost per GFLOP to $650. It was $41,205 for the entire cluster ( pizza and all ) cost list: http://aggregate.org/KLAT2/cost.html .

The New Contender in the Compelling Content Wars

The newest guys in the field of compelling content, or set-top boxes, or console systems, whatever you want to call them, is Indrema. They plan to release a Linux based home entertainment center called L600 in the spring of 2001. According to their website, it will play any game written for Linux, browse the web with the Mozzilla browser, hold and play your MP3 collection, and play DVD's, but perhaps the most advanced feature it will offer is Internet Video Channels (IVC). With IVC owners of the L600 will be able to search online repositories of near DVD quality programming and download them to watch on demand.

Now this sounds well and good, but the people who think they should know about things like this (i.e. SlashDot members) seem to think it will flop. They argue that the L600 and the MicroSoft X-Box (a similarly spec'd console currently slated to be a gaming system) have no market to sell to. I tend to disagree with them. Most people that don't have computers now, don't have them because they say they are too expensive. The L600 with an MSRP under $299 will give these people a portal to the Internet and E-mail, that can also replace their cable box. As long as Indrema markets the L600 this way, and oh yeah it will play some games, it should sell fairly well. I do doubt that we will see these in every household in America, but you might find one at my house.

Compelling Content... What is it? Who wants it?

This newest fad in home entertainment was kicked off with the release of WebTV, a small box that sits on your TV and lets you browse the Internet (poorly), send E-mail, and interact with some TV shows (at least in theory). The concept behind this and some upcoming products is compelling content.

Just what is "compelling content"?

Simply put, compelling content is the industry's drive to have consumers do every thing they want to do from one machine. This may include browsing the web, sending E-mail, playing games, or the newest thing TV on demand.

Who wants all this?

The manufactures of these gadgets, sometimes called Internet Appliances, are hoping that everyone will want one. The only problem with all this is that TV's only have 500 lines of resolution, which means text will be blurry and hard to read, but when HDTV becomes mainstream this problem will go away.

It's up to you to decide if you want to buy a computer and a console game system and one of these toys, or just do everything from your computer, or perhaps you can get by with just a set-top jack-of-all-trades box.

One step closer

Recently, Apple computers has released Developers Preview 4 of their new operating system, Mac OS X. With OS X, Apple is creating a new operating system that contains a UNIX core. Because of this, the new macintosh computers running OS X will be able to run any non GUI UNIX program as well as all the applications written specifically for OS X. With creating a user friendly GUI interface for a UNIX system, Apple is bringing many homes a step closer to having a stable computer in their home that's still easy to use.

In the past, the macintosh platform's greatest strength has been it's ease of use. However, the platform has also had stability and (lack of) software problems. By using the Mach kernel and creating a new environment compatible with older Mac OSes, OS X can now take advantage of all the strengths of both UNIX and Mac OS. Support for the new operating system has been overwhelming according to Apple. They have support from some of the mainstream UNIX companies, such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard and IBM. Coming this summer, there will be a public beta testing of Mac OS X. The final version 1.0 of Mac OS X will be released in January 2001. More information about Mac OS X can be found at the Apple website at http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies.html.

Corporate Big Wigs don't like the word Dream they like the word Goal. It sound so much more professional! A goal is simply a dream taken seriously. When you smartize a dream it becomes a goal

Smart Goals!

Perception of Value

Far to often we take for granted those things that are common place to us. It is not until their loss do we perceive a value of them. Our parents have been here all of our lives. It is not until one passes that we know how much we loved them. It is the loss of something valuable that is painful. Unfortunately, most fight not to loose instead of to retain or gain!

Since time is the most precious commodity in the world, the least valued but most important perception of value is the time of others!

I know that for 3 going on 4 years now I have been searching for a mentor. Last year I almost got one. However, when I was meeting with him the possibility of a job came up. I was blinded by the vision of working for him. I failed to see the key goal at hand. I allowed the real value of his time to be corrupted by the perceived value of a job. Oh true, I have had several coaches over the past 4 years. Most of them would be willing to be my mentor. But, I have only met 3 men in the world that I would be willing to have as a mentor.

What saddens me is that I finally understand how they must feel, their disappointment in me. The fact that I have not tapped into my potential. The fact that have lost vision of the future for the site of the present. The fact that I have not even achieved 1% of my possibilities. For you see, I have lost interest in my proteges. I see a bigger future for them than they see. I see their true potential while they see their self inflicted current situation. I see lazy individuals that are not willing to go that first mile long no the extra mile. Individuals that cave at the first sign of trouble or the world no! People that become powerless by the opinions of others!

Our youth mentor program has amassed some extremely talented and sought after individuals. People that are paid for their time and knowledge. Unfortunately, our youth do not value their help or opinions. Maybe this is a sign of my failure to edify our adult volunteers correctly.

A few weeks ago one of the men I want to become my mentor asked us to think back to high school to remember our dreams for our lives. Have we accomplished them... I don't know if I am said or happy to say yes, all but one of them:

• Redesign the global communication network.
• Be retired by the time I was 35.
• Develop large scale MIS team/department.
• Build a better relationship with my parents!
• Build an android(2).

On the first of this month I disposed of the family business. I didn't want it in the `70s, `80s', `90s... When my father had his open hart surgery, I walked back into the family business. I took it over not for my father's sake. But, to get closer to my mother and father. As long as he needed me I was there. Dad officially retired in March. I extremely enjoyed working with my father. But since he is no longer working, neither am I. It is difficult to see the business go. But I didn't enjoy the business, I enjoyed the time with my parents. June has been an emotional time for me. I guess it is like a father seeing his only daughter married. Glad to see her growth, but said to see her go.

I guess the best way to have value for others is to have value for yourself. With no major goals to accomplish I am like a boat on the might Mississippi, floating where the river takes me. Complacent and comfortable with my happenstance. But we must remember, that even a dead fish can float down stream.

This is a dangerous place to be. So comfortable that there is no motivation to move on. Afraid of the hard work that faces us that we are not willing to try. Petrified of the unknown. Subconsciously, not valuing the opinions of others that have already been there so not to see that it is worth the effort.

Maybe it is time for some new goals, and more importantly action!

The Corder Foundation

• Future Christian Leaders' Association
• Camp Corder
• The Corder Boarding School
• The Corder University

What I would love to have is someone to help me put a price tag on these goals, to smartize them, and prioritize them. This is one of the rolls of a mentor. To help you focus on your dreams and goals. To give you a realistic outlook on them. To help you measure your distance, both future and past success. To set milestones for your accomplishments.

The pilot light is lit, now all I have to do is turn up the gas. Help me Lord!

Footnotes

(1)

Proper swap configuration is beyond the scope of this article. In general, swap should be configured to be the size of the largest process on the system.

(2)

The android is not "currently" technically feasible.