Lately with the e-Sword 9 change in format (which requires a bunch of work to re-download all the modules), I decided to look at some other electronic bible study tools. Being poor, cost was important. I know that Logos is amazing, but I'm just don't have money like that to spend.  I found a review of another free bible study tool called “The Word” (www.theword.gr) which rated it very highly.  I gave it a spin and found the interface dramatically more intuitive, flexible, and responsive. Searching, navigating books, even just reading the bible is far better.  Read on for a full review.

Well, i've been konverted. I don't think I've used kde for more than 10 minutes sense I've switched to Ubuntu. The kde4 release was notoriously bad, but even the later updates didn't really fix most of the issues with it.

Anyway, I've been trying it out on Jaunty and it seems pretty stable. There are definitely a few rough spots, but this much is clear to me. That the massive refactoring they did with kde4 is starting to pay off. Gtk+ seems pretty much stuck in the mud, and although gnome had really begun to be very well refined, it is clear that it will not be capable rapid innovation the way that kde is moving.

The kde window manager has a very smooth feel to it, compiz had all kinds of issues with screen artifacts on my nvidia card. Kate is a fantastic text editor (much better than gedit). The music player Amorok is very polished and works with my mp3 player.  The PIM tools are fairly good.

Having sung it's praises, kde 4 still has a way to go. The network manager interface is junk. The bluetooth tray icon crashes. I'm still using synaptic to do my package management, the kde version is missing several important features. One thing I'm pretty confident of though, the next year or two should see dramatic improvements on the kde front where gnome will remain gnome.

Initially I was trying to design things with PHP4 compatibility, and one of the key features PHP4 lacked was static and private variables. To work around the inability to have static variables, I used several singleton classes that had member variables. My cache object, my database abstraction layer, my plugin hook manager were all singleton classes stored in global variables and then imported (via the global keyword) and used in functions where needed.

What I realized however, was that this is generally more code than is really necessary. Importing variables from the global scope is one more line of code. In general most things aren't really truly 'global' in scope, most would be better of stored as a static variable on the class that uses or defines the variable. It's easier to use and conforms to the "separation of concerns" design pattern. I'm probably going to remove 80% of my 20 or so global variables that I had created in CMS.

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.

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.