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Latest Content

• jQuery

  I have lately been moving all my javascript coding to jQuery. I highly recommend it. I don't think I can ever go back to writing my own event handlers, ajax, etc... the syntax is fantastic. Just a tip, if you need to get a input with a name with square brackets, enclose your name in single quotes like [name='inputname[]'].
  
  
  

• Firefox 3.0rc1

  I just installed the latest Firefox, and man am I happy. The previous beta version (5) was really leaking memory like a sieve. After upgrading to hardy heron (the latest version of Ubuntu), my hard drive was just going crazy. Thinking that I just needed more RAM (my laptop only has 512) just to have eclipse running with firefox and my email open, I went out and bought another GB. After upgrading to rc1 things are MUCH more responsive.

• Ubuntu Hardy Heron

  I highly recommend Hardy Heron, it fixed several noticeable bugs in Gutsy. No longer does evolution start up with error messages about being unable to connect to my POP email (even though it works fine after it starts up). Accessing FTP and SSH ftp sites seems to be much more stable with the gvfs conversion. At first video playback was very slow, but then I did some searching about, and found the problem was XGL. So if video performance seems worse after the upgrade, try removing XGL, you can run compiz without it now. The only downside I can find is that Firefox 3 beta 5 (while definitely being better than 2) has some stability problems, which I'm sure will be worked out in the next month or two.

• The Ultimate e-Sword Bible

  I found quite possibly one of the most useful tools for studying the bible.  It's a Septuigint (LXX) and a NA27 with Strong's (updated for 7.9.5+) and Wescott-Hort parsing info.  Together the Strong's numbers and the Wescott-Hort parsing info gives you enough information to make up for not knowing Greek pretty well.  If you know the different usages of a word, the tense of the verbs and whether they are singular or plural it gives you alot more than reading a single English version of the bible.  When you are able to search for all the usages of words you have the ability to do some serious word study.

  I think the LXX is a critical to understanding the Greek of the New Testament.  It is the Old Testament that the authors of the New Testament read, and therefore shapes their usage of the Greek language significantly.  It is important to recognize that the New Testiment is a Hebrew document that happens to be written in Greek.  The Greek of the NT is the Greek of the LXX blended with the common or koine Greek of the day and NOT the Greek of Classical Greek literature, and their word usage therefore carries none of the metaphysical implications of the philosophers, but rather that of the Old Testament.

  Download the whopping 60 meg bible here.

• Birmingham 21

  My friend and fellow classmate Micah has been having many dreams moving him to call the youth of KC to fast 21 days ending on good Friday for the ending of abortion.  Knowing him and knowing how the lord has been leading him, I know that this is a significant time period.  I'm expecting a local breakthrough with national impact. So I'm using whatever small readership I have to give it a plug.  For more details see his blog at http://birmingham21.wordpress.com/

• Wrong About Heaven

  Of all places I expected a clear concise explanation of classic premillennial eschatology it was not Time magazine.  Right now the most read article on time.com is an interview with a Anglican Bishop where he explains the typical view of heaven and contrasts it with the clear Biblical picture of a renewed earth and a bodily resurrection.  An article like this can do more to correct the doctrine (or at least lessen the resistance to the preaching of the gospel of the kingdom) than a hundred books and a thousand sermons.  Any way check out Christians Wrong About Heaven.
  

• Re-thinking Content Management

  warning: blatent self promotion ahead... 

  A Survey of the Field

  I was looking at MODx today and I cannot help but think,"haven't we done this before?"  From what I see the content management falls broadly into two categories.  First there are applications that does one thing and does it well.  Numerous bulletin boards, image galleries, and blogging packages fit into this category.  Wordpress started out this way, although it is gradually being morphed into a real general purpose CMS.  The other category would be complex, general purpose CMSs. Most of these tend to have separate modules to handle for instance news, and images.  They may share some framework to allow modules to be added and removed.  They probably link to the same user info, use the same utility classes perhaps, can (if your lucky, sorry Joomla users) be placed in a common set of categories, but as a whole each type of content is it's own world.  In short most general purpose CMSs are a conglomeration of specialty content management tools. 

  Taking a Step Back

  Sometimes in order to understand something it is useful to look at the big picture of what is trying to be accomplished.  We are trying to manage content.  We have stuff; we need to view it, organize it, search it, change it, promote it, and talk about it.  We want to be able to stick it anywhere on a page.  We want to generate lists of it, tables of it.  We want to put our lists where we want and change the look and feel whenever we feel like it.

  Why is it then that our stuff isn't just stuff, our content isn't content?  We have images, articles, events, whatever that must be treated as separate things.  It's all just stuff.  Yes there are things we want to do with images that we don't want to do with blog posts, but there is a whole lot of things we want to do with all our stuff.  Furthermore if it isn't written (or uploaded) content it's programmatically generated content, and we want to be able to but that anywhere we want.

  Enter Groupy

  The concept that all our stuff is either written content or programmatically generated is one of the core ideas behind Groupy.  Within groupy there are two main things that users deal with, modules and content.  You can put your modules anywhere in your skin/template.  There are modules that can display one or more content (or do whatever), and there is content.  Images are content, news articles are content, events are content.  You can link to, embed, or display content inside other content, or you can embed a module with a list of the most viewed content in the middle of your article.  The result is a remarkably powerful system with alot less buttons.

• The Star of Bethlehem

  I think this guy got it right...  He found the sign in the heavens that made the magi travel all those miles to Jerusalem seeking the newborn Jewish king.  His argument is very persuasive and science impeccable.  My roommate was given the movie DVD and it is very high quality.  Anyway head over to http://thestarofbethlehemmovie.com/.

• Debugging Web Services

  As I was implementing the XMLRPC Services for the Wordpress API I was struggling with figuring out how to debug it. At first I was using wireshark (a packet capture tool), but that was capturing a bunch of packets I didn't need to see as well as not pairing request with responses. Then I found the answer, a Firefox plugin called Tamper Data, very easy to use and very powerful. Anyway if your developing any sort of web service or perhaps doing ajax development I recommend it.

• Now Using Groupy

  As you can tell, I'm now using groupy for my blog.  All the articles and news were automatically imported from by old wordpress blog through the new groupy import tool.  I'll be cleaning up for a little while, so thank you for bearing with me.