Command Line Linux on a WebOS phone

(Or how to install Nethack on your phone)

The WebOS (HP/Palm) phones are some of the most interesting phones to me as a technology guy (geek). They, more than iPhone or even Android allow you to have easy, supported (or at least not hindered) near ultimate control over your phone. More particularly, underneath WebOS, is a real Linux system. Once you enable it, there’s even a package management system similar to apt-get.

And while the actual setup of access the Linux command line was relatively simple, there were a few places where steps were harder that they should be. So this is my attempt to write down what I did to get it working.

Note: The Preware documentation is excellent. Kudos to the WebOS Internals team for their efforts. It’s worth the $.99 to get it. And it supports the the WebOS Internals project.

However, to get to a real Linux command line experience on your WebOS phone, you need to go a few steps further than what the Preware documentation talks about.

So I’ll start where that document leaves off. Now, as I’ve only had a WebOS phone for a few days, I may well not know the best way to accomplish this – I’m just going to share what worked for me. Hopefully if there are better ways, someone can respond and I’ll try to update these instructions.

Step 0. Preliminaries:

Follow the instructions in the Preware Homebrew Documentation. (It really is worth the $.99 in the App Catalogue) Once you have downloaded WebOS Quick Install and installed Preware on your phone, go on to the next step.

Step 1. Go to Preware, install "Bourne Again Shell"

Note 1: the best way to find something in Preware is to swipe back until you see the "List of Everything", choose that and then start typing. That will search for the package you want.

Note 2: I’m not sure that it’s necessary to install Bash, it seems like I read that there is a default version of sh installed. However, I had already installed Bash before I realized this, so to maintain the integrity of these instructions, I’m including this. Plus, bash is a better shell for interactive use than sh.

Step 2. Install a terminal app.

To get to the command line, you will need a terminal app of some kind. This is the most annoying part of the instructions currently. This part shouldn’t be as hard as it it.

Unfortunately, the most talked about terminal app "Terminal" apparently no longer works on the current versions of WebOS, and so has been removed from Preware. Xterm is the other terminal that is talked about online. However, I was not able to get it to work when I tried (some library wasn’t found). Also, I don’t know how to invoke xterm from WebOS without having a terminal present. So, there’s a little bit of a chicken and egg problem.

So, that leaves us with 2 choices, Terminus and SDLTerminal. I very much suggest SDLTerminal at this point, but I’m going to go through the process to get both up and running.

Terminus

Terminus is available in Preware. However it may not come up successfully out of the box. (If it looks like just a blank screen, the you will need the below instructions) Also, I haven’t been able to find any list of keybindings for things like ESC, Ctrl, and various symbols necessary for Unix like |, <,>, etc. In addition, it’s font size is tiny to the point of miniscule on the HP Veer’s small screen.

However, here is what you have to do to get it to be minimally viable (unfortunately I don’t know how to get it to be more than that).

1. Install "Internalz Pro" from Preware.
2. Open Internalz Pro and go to preferences.
3. Under the "Text Editor" section change the "Newline format" to "Linux".
4. Using Internals Pro, navigate to /var/palm/data
5. Open the file "jailusers"
6. Find any lines that have "terminus" in them.
7. Delete every line with "terminus" in it except for the one that ends in "jail_native-palm.conf"
8. Save the file

Terminus should now come up and display a shell prompt (rather than just blank screen with a cursor). However, as I mentioned before, it’s font size is tiny, and I can’t tell how to create special characters, so its utility for me was minimal.

Therefore I started looking at SDLTerminal …

SDLTerminal

While I vastly prefer the experience of SDLTerminal, installing it is a hassle. Here are the steps it took to get it on the phone.

Note: while SDLTerminal is listed in Preware, I (and others it appears) have had trouble downloading it from there. For me the download just sat there spinning each time I tried to download it.

The solution at this point is to search PreCentral for SDLTerminal. The first thread that comes up is the one you want. You will need to have register with PreCentral if you haven’t already to be able to download the file you need. Registering with PreCentral was it’s own hassle. If I’m able later I’ll try to find a link to the page that actually let me register.

1. Find the top thread on PreCentral for SDLTerminal
2. Go to the first post on that thread

Note: You should copy down the keybindings from that post somewhere, as they are necessary for effective command line use on Linux

3. Download that file to your computer
4. Unzip that file, there will be a .ipk file inside.
5. Make sure your phone is in "developer mode" (refer to the Preware Homebrew Documentation mentioned earlier)
6. Connect your phone back to your computer, choose "just charge".
7. Open WebOS Quick Install (used earlier to install Preware)
8. Choose the .ipk file that was in the zip file (I believe you use the "+" button in Quick Install and browse)
9. Click "Install" in Quick Install

At this point SDLTerminal should be on your phone. You can disconnect your phone from your computer, close Quick Install, and turn off developer mode on your phone if you want to.

SDL Terminal should come up and you should see a usable shell prompt. Try a few Linux commands like pwd or ls.

Now for the rest of the Linux system.

Go back to Preware and install "Optware Advanced Linux Command Line Installer"

This will install a command line package manager similar to apt-get. In this case it is called ipkg-opt on the command line.

Note: you may also need to install "Optware Bootstrap" but I think it may have been installed automatically when I installed the above package.

Run "ipkg-opt list" to get a list of packages available for install.

(You probably want to do "ipkg-opt list | less" since SDLTerminal doesn’t appear to support scrolling at this time.)

At this point you should be able to install anything you want.

For example,

ipkg-opt install nethack

I installed openssh, inetutils, and yes, nethack. Now I can ssh into my web servers to edit config files or restart webservers from my phone if I need to. Although the experience would be a bit constrained, I could even write programs on or from the phone if I wanted to.

Posterous First Thoughts

Here are my first impressions…

Overall I like it so far. I like the theme I’ve chosen. And I like that it is possible to write my own theme if I really want to.

However there are a few things that were small concerns:

1. Posting is fairly fairly easy but there are some things it took a while to figure out. Specifically, it took a while to get the autoposting via email working smoothly.
2. I’m not sure how secure Posterous is from someone else posting to my blog. It seems like maybe you could spoof the email address? I seem to recall they had some kind of issue with that at one point. I think they fixed whatever issue it was, and from that discussion it was obvious that they had some method of validating that the email was coming from the proper party. I don’t know enough to be able to tell whether there are still ways to get around it.
3. I’m sad that they don’t offer an easy export option. I’d like to be able to get my data out easily when I want to. It looks like they support autoposting to WordPress, so I’m considering just running a WordPress blog that I autopost everything to, just so I have a copy of everything in a place / format where I can at least work out a way to export from.

Fear and Trust

I’ve been thinking about the downgrade in the US debt rating, and wondering what sort of impact it is going to have. I imagine that much of it’s actual impact will come from fear.

I realize that even I can pick up some of that fear and be effected by it. I can worry about how it will effect my job stability and job prospects.

But what I really need to do is trust in the Lord. Jesus isn’t effected by the Federal government, or by some investment rating company’s opinion of the Federal government. The Lord promises to meet my needs. If I will trust in that, or go to God until I trust in that, then all that I fear becomes irrelevant. As long as I am not coveting things beyond my needs, I need not have fear. The Lord has promised to meet all my needs.

Sieve of Eratosthenes

The Sieve of Eratosthenes is a reasonably efficient method for finding prime numbers.

Here is a quick implementation in Python (there are some further optimizations possible). For whatever reason, it made a lot more sense to me when I implemented it in Python than the previous implementation I’d seen done in Java.

# determine a list of all primes less than some number 'ceiling'
def list_primes(ceiling):

    # This array (list) will hold all the primes we find
    primes = []

    # a is a array (list) of true/false values (1 and 0)
    # indicating whether it's index is a prime number
    a = [1] * ceiling

    # we want to start with 2 as the first prime
    # so we mark out indexes 0 and 1 to start.
    a[0] = 0
    a[1] = 0

    # Now we begin the real algorithm.
    for i in range(0, len(a)):
        if a[i]:
            p = i
            n = 2
            while (n * p) < len(a):
                a[n * p] = 0
                n = n + 1

    # collect all the indicies that have been determined to be prime
    for i in range(0, len(a)):
        if a[i]:
            primes += [i]

    return primes

Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes ) has a good writeup and visual of the method.

Basically I started with an array with slots for as many numbers as I am testing. The array starts with every slot marked true except for 0 and 1. Then for every number that you come to, if it is marked true (which happens first when you get to 2), you mark every multiple of the index as false.

So, as you interate through the numbers, if you come to a number and it is still marked true, then it is prime, so you mark all it’s multiples as false (not prime). And so on.

This ends up being faster than most of the schemes that I had tried that rely on testing numbers through division. In those cases you are still checking every number to see if it is divisable. But with this Sieve method all you have to do by the time you get to a number is check a truth value.

Prime Conjecture #1

Every prime number greater than 2 is odd.

My Fiance

My beautiful beeeaaaauuuutiful fiance 🙂

Blogging

I keep writing little blog engines. but I don’t seem to get to the place of actually using them. I think that’s because what I really want is a convenient way to publish, but I don’t really care about all the control.

I think that blogging falls into the catagory of things I don’t need absolute control over. I want it to just work. And my requirements are fairly minimal so I don’t need all the control that hosting my own site provides.

On the other hand, I have actually enjoyed writing my latest blog engine in CherryPy http://www.cherrypy.org/. But I don’t need to ssh into the box to do each post. I’d be okay with a system that just let me compose my posts offline and then submit them.

What have I done today?

I’ve been working on a solution to Project Euler #8. (Later: I found solutions for Project Euler #8 and #9 today)

I’ve read some in the Real Analysis book I have checked out from the library.

I explored exporting my blog from Blogger (Google Blogs?). to Posterous. I think I’m going to try it. (As this is being posted to Posterous, I have tried it).

Writing Test

This is really just a test to see how many words I can write on one sheet of paper if I’m not really being careful about it. I’m trying to see how much it takes to write about 300 words. I don’t really have any idea whether it will turn out to be one page, or two, or three. I think if I could do at least one interesting topic per day of about 300 words I could have a viable blog.

Ultimately, I suppose my hope is that once I’m used to writing, that I could turn that writing into a book. But I think that the first step is to get writing. The thing is that I’m trying to come up with an amount of writing that I can or will do actually on a daily basis. Often in the past I would try to be overly ambitious or I would start and then raise my standards. In this case what I’m trying to do is just come up with something that is fairly reasonable. I’m wondering if limiting each topic to one page of paper would be reasonable. I don’t actually know my word count for one page but I feel like one page would not be intimidating while multiple pages (per topic) might be.

Hello Posterous

This is my first post to posterous.

I’ve imported my previous posts from my blog on blogspot.

It will be interesting to see how this blog does.

Back to blogging

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here.

I keep intending to move my blog off of here and onto my own hosting. However, those efforts have been derailed by various factors.

I still intend to try that again, but that requires setting up the software to do so, and I am not quite ready to do that again yet.

My intent is either to write my own blogging engine in whatever language seems most enjoyable (currently Common Lisp), or use some kind of interesting static site generator like Jekyll.

But for the moment I would just like to get back to writing. So this should be fine for that.

Haskell, C, Project Euler and Words

This is a quick test to try to understand how long it takes to write 800 words.

I’m trying to understand that because Steve Yegge posited 800 words as his preferred normal word count, and I’d like to know whether that is a reasonable count for me to try to get to also. Mostly I’m trying to figure out what it would take for me to post more regularly on a blog. I know that there is a difference between quality and quantity, and I’m a little afraid that if I’m optimizing for speed, I may well not have much worth saying.

However, I think it’s possible that the regularity of posting would mean that there is a greater likelihood of me being disciplined enough that whenever I have good stuff it would get posted rather than the current circumstance where it is easy for stuff to never actually make it onto the site.

The things I would like to focus on are programming and Christian life.

I don’t know that those actually go together, but those are the things that interest me most, so that’s what I imagine I will tend to talk about.

I am also getting a little bit back into Math as I’ve been working on the problems from Project Euler. It’s nice to be doing them in Haskell since it’s support form mathematical notation (especially for sequences) makes it a lot easier for me to conceptualize when I’m working through problems. It makes me want to re-read my Abstract Algebra book and go through the Discrete Mathematics book that I’ve been meaning to read.

It might be nice someday to end up in a position where those kinds of problems are ones that I work on regularly. I daydream of going back to college sometimes and these kinds of problems have made me consider whether it would make sense to explore a degree in something like Decision Science or some kind of statistical modeling field. I think Haskell would be suited to that kind of work also, as long as it could be modeled discretely and not as a continuous curve.

This is very different from my other current projects of trying to develop mobile web apps. That’s a completely different kind of programming. Arguably more practical, more results oriented.

I’m not sure which I prefer. I like the mental challenge of the kinds of problems Project Euler represents, but I don’t know of any practical applications of that kind of programming, except perhaps for cryptography, but to get into those kinds of real problems, would take a lot more research than I am willing to commit to right now.

So far I’ve been able to do the various Project Euler problems I’ve tried in both Haskell and C. In all cases so far, I have solved the problem first in Haskell and then created a solution in C based on the understanding I gained from doing it in Haskell. Typically my solutions in C are not direct translations from Haskell since the languages are so different that what works in one is almost physically opposed to what works in the other language.

However, there is a transference of concepts of a sort.

If you look at iteration as traversing a sequence of numbers, then a C solution can be constructed that mimics some of the ideas embodied in the Haskell sequence oriented solutions.

The trick is that where in Haskell I’ve mapped an operation across each member of the number sequence, in C, I traverse the sequence (well sequentially) and apply the operations as I get to each number.

Essentially a for loop is a map across the indexes of the for loop. The stuff inside the for/while loop is the function that is being mapped across the sequence.

It’s not quite that Haskell and C are opposites (although some senses they are) but in this case more like they are different axis. They feel perhaps orthogonal to each other. Each of them can map to a problem, but they do it in completely different (but somehow related ways). It’s like each of them is a shadow of the problem on a different wall. Each contains a representation of the problem, but they are different shapes.

I am glad to be learning both at the same time, and I am glad to be using each to go through Project Euler at the same time, as it causes me to think about things that I would otherwise be too lazy to pursue on my own.

I think at some point it would be interesting once I am more familiar with C and Haskell to go back through some of these problems with C++.

I might appreciate C++ more since it has better support for sequences than C and thus some solutions from Haskell might translate more directly into C++ than into C. I also had the realization this morning that the way that I collect information in Haskell to solve proble may map fairly well onto object

Thoughts from last Wednesday (2010-05-05)

I’m going to start off just trying to type here.

I’m experimenting with the differences between a typewriter and a computer. On the typewriter I find it comfortable to look at the keys, but on a computer keyboard I find it much more comforable to look at the text that I’m typing. I don’t know if that’s becasue of the structure of the keyboard, or something else. On a typewriter the keyboard is inclined enough that you can actually see all the keys pretty easily even when you are typing. But on a computer keyboard, the keys are covered by your hands so that much of the keyboard is hidden. Thus there isn’t an easy way to tell what keys you are actually hitting from looking at the keyboard while you type. It’s actually easier just to watch the screen and see from that what key you’ve hit.

On the typewriter this morning I was having some amount of fun trying to type while not looking at thie keyboard. I think that is still actually a fun thing to do, but I find that I don’t trust myself as much on a computer keyboard as I do on a typewriter. It’s a little harder to feel exactly what I am doing and which kyes I’m actually hitting. So far I don’ty mind it, but I’m not actually sure that it makes sense for me on a continued basics to try to write wrihout looking. I knhow that I make more mistakes when I am not looking, and that it’s harder for me to correct them – in fact I am not going back to correct anything when I write like this. I don’t even know whether I have or haven’t made mistakes.

I don’t know why I don’t have more trouble with the apostrophe which is different on the computer keyboard and the typewriterrs I have. For some reason it doesn’t actually cause me trouble that it ieems to be in different places on the two forms of keyboards. Somehow I am able to not get confused and still keep on writing at a pretty good pace even with the differnce in placement.

Lord Jesus, I love you, I want you in my life. I long to see you more than I do, and to be faithful to you in my walk and in my life. Thank you for saving me and for making me a member of your people and your body. Thank you that you have rescued me from this world and from all the ways that I have led myself into trouble. Thank you for saving me and delivering me from my enemy and the enemies of my soul. Thank you that you have been a friend to me and a friend to my soul. Thank you that you have not left me an orphan, but came to me and rescued me and adopted me into your family and into your kingdom. Thank you Jesus that you are a good king and a great Lord. You are the one that I would want to follow out of all the leaders in the earth and the heavens. Thank you that you came to rescue me and to give me a place amoung your own.

I don’t know if writing this way if I’ll be able to resist the temptation to try to see how much I have written. I don’t know if I need to resist it. I think in some ways, it’s cool that I can’t see how much I’ve written. It helps to avoid the writer’s block effect of the blank page. But on the other hand, I begin to get nervous after I have typed a while that I want to see whether I’m making any kind of progress – which seems to be correlated to length in my head.

I wonder if when I get that feeling, if I would just stop, clear the line, and rest for a moment, and then begin again anew, if that would help deal with that feeling. It may be that the feeling comes from pushing too hard, and trying to keep words flowing beyond the point that there is any need to.

One other thing is that this is just supposed to be a place where I can type my thoughts, not that it has to be a place that I fill with an endless stream of drivel.

I think I have eaten too many carrots this morning. They are making me feel a little queasy, and that makes me not want to do anything.

One thing that I don’t know how is going to effect me is the feeling that my thoughts are just kind of going directly down a hole where I can’t see them anymore. Although in actuality I will be able to see them quite easily when I decide to. Maybe that contributes to the feeling of wanting to look at how far I’ve gotten in terms of writing.

I would be curious to know just how much writing I produce during a day if I am constantly writing.

I don’t know if I like writing the hard parts of a mystery story. Writing about death isn’t fun. Bringing death front and center to be the main focus isn’t fun. But it is powerful, and it is real. It just needs to be made manifest that it isn’t the final end. But that makes it more disturbing in some cases, rather than less. it depends on what happens after death. A life that is cut short, that sends a soul to final judgement that had not make peace with God, that is a tragedy. Although there are times for judgement in this world, and a life that had done horrible things – it might be right to take out of the world. But a life that is cut short without the final chance for repentance provokes sadness. But everyone has the chance for repentance always. Almost none of us come to that final moment without at some point having had the opportunity to address ones state before God.

When Jesus said, Do you think that those on whom the tower of siloam fell, do you think that they were worse sinners than you? No, but I say to you that unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. That indicates our lives are all subject to end, we don’t know when that end will come. So don’t delay in making things right.

I think maybe that’s what Jesus is talking about when he says agree with your adversary on the way, before you get to the judge, because once you get to the judge, you will be forced to pay to the fullest cent.

[The thought box is the little one line text field that I use for writing currently – it’s just a way I’ve configured my text editor – It seems to dramatically help me with being able to write without experiencing "writer’s block.]

I have thought about calling the thought box the pensieve after the Harry Potter books, but that might be a little esoteric to anyone not familiar with those books. And in this case it doesn’t capture memories, but just running thoughts. For me to capture memories in it, I would have to think about those memories in verbal form, which is actually kind of hard to do as I’m reading the text I’m writing.

If I were going to actually try to notate memories, I might have to try not to look at the text I was producing.

I don’t really want to be working on anything more today – but there are things that I really should be working on, that I don’t know whether there is any way to get out of.

So far trying to do remote administration through emacs is a bit more awkward than just logging in through putty and running the programs directly on the server.

I’m thinking about the fact that I really don’t have anything prepared for the meeting tonight.

I’m about ready to go, so I guess I’ll probably shut down this buffer in just a few minutes.

Random Thoughts from last Tuesday

If this is just my buffer for all my random thoughts today, will I actually use it for stuff or will I just end up writing random stuff elsewhere?

I’m not sure whether it really matters whether I use emacs or vim for text creation, and really for text editing, vim and emacs with viper mode are essentially the same. The only real difference I notice is when I am trying to navigate source code, vim has some features that are currently easier and more reliable than it seems like the equivalent viper/emacs features are.

One of the problems with stream of consciousness typing is that I get into loops that don’t really go anywhere.

I love you God. I am so thankful that you are in my life, in my heart and in my soul. I am grateful that you have taken me out of darkness and given me new life. I am grateful that you did not leave me in the mess that my pride and arrogance had created. I am grateful that you have taught me humility and goodness, and that those are more valuable than all the greatness that I longed for before.

I am grateful that your life is so good that you were willing to give of yourself to help me. I am grateful that you did not leave me alone to fend for myself in this world, but you were willing to come into my world and do what it took to help me out of the mess that I had created.

I am thankful for all your grace in my life and all the ways in which you were willing to deal with me with kindness to bring about the grace of God in my life. Thank you Lord that you were willing to give everything to bring about the situation where you could gain me and all those others like me that you have saved.

I don’t really know whether there is anything to recommend vim over emacs just for writing. Once stuff is down, if I wanted to go back and edit it, I think I would probably prefer one to the other, with the default going to Vim at this point, but I’m not sure. Maybe if I were more competent with Emacs, I would begin to prefer it for the editing.

I don’t really know whether it makes much difference where I type stuff since I can pretty much make emacs and vim behave similarly enough that it doesn’t make a difference to me.

given that, I’m not sure that there is really any difference except from the standpoint of what to do after stuff is finished.

There are really only two real differences I can detect between emacs and vim at this point for what I am trying to do. One is that emacs can be made transparent. The other is that vim seems slower sometimes, and seems to hang once in a while when it updates something. Otherwise it really is almost indistinguishable after a little bit of work to make them behave similarly.

The advantage that emacs has over vim, is that other emacs funtions are available and the same emacs instance that is open on the buffer, can be used to do other things also, and still refer to that buffer as necessary. The advantage of vim is that it can be expanded to full screen and then all the vim standard editing commands can be utilized.

I think that for this kind of thing, it makes sense to use emacs, because I really don’t need vim’s editing capabilities, and it seems useful to only have one editor that I am trying to use.

One thing I think that I like about emacs, is that it really is more configurable, so as my tastes change, I can move things around and still use emacs, where with vim, it contains more functionality out of the box currently, but really isn’t that configurable, at least not for me. Every time I have tried to configure it beyond it’s basic nature, at some point it starts to feel clumsy also, like I’m just bolting things on. Emacs feels more seemless when things work, but it feels like it’s more work to get things to the point where they are working. Vim has more functionality out of the box, and is easier to configure for small changes, but once you try to do major things, you run into it’s limitations.

I still think Vim’s actual editing commands are in general cleaner and better, but for just writing, I don’t really need those. It’s only when I’m doing editing or text transformation that those things really come in handy. But for just writing, they are really pretty equivalent for me right now. Given that, emacs has some advantages just from the standpoint of doing other things also. It has a fairly mature file manager in dired. It can connect to other servers better than vim’s netrw capabilities. It has a sql client that I use regularly.

That said, it is usually a bit of a hassle to get anything new working on it. I can usually expect to spend at least a day playing around with stuff to get to the point where I have all the magic right to get a new thing working. And there are frustratingly many things that almost work, but not quite.

This is in contrast to vim, where like I said, I don’t even bother trying to use most plugins, because I’m so used to plugings not working or not really adding anything valuble. On the other hand Vim had <em>almost</em> everything I need built in. Certainly everything for text- editing. It doesn’t have a good shell, but neither does Emacs on Windows really.

I was just able to control vim from emacs through vim’s remote-send command. That could make things pretty cool if I can get it to somehow work with emacs.

I don’t really know when or if I will actually be able to do all the stuff I want to do as far as writing. The whole, stream of consciousness thing is not all that wonderful as far as producing quality. I think that there is a lot that I would like to write, but I am not at all sure that what I have to say without actually thinking about stuff is really worth reading. I am wondering how much I could actually write if I just wrote whatever came along for as long as I could stand to type. I think that this would enable me to put a lot of words on the page, but I am really not conviced that it would make anything worth reading.

Why is self-control not legalism? I am glad it is not, but how is self-control different from ascetism. How is self control different from self-denial? I don’t know that I totally understand the differences. One is a work of the Holy Spirit. The other tends to be a work of the flesh, although even self denial can be from the Lord if it is in the process of us doing the right thing or learning how to deal with a lack in our lives.

I wish that there were a command line version of the bible for Windows. I wonder how hard it would be to make one. I don’t think it would really be that hard. I could probably do it reasonably easily. I wonder whether it would be better for me to learn how to do it in C, or to take the quick and easy route and do it in tcl. It would probably be very easy to emulate the kjv bible that is on Ubuntu in tcl. It might not be quite as fast, but I bet it would be fast enough, and with the bible, you spend most of your time reading and not searching. So I think it would be ok.

Jesus, help me to know what to do with my life and the abilities you have given me. Help me to be for your kingdom and useful for your kingdom. I want to be able to be a good and faithful servant. If there is a way for my life to be for the good of many, I would like that to be the case. How much will I have to sacrifice to be able to help others? How do I gain that which I will need to sacrifice?

How do I gain the provision to be able to work on the things that I think are useful?

I think it would be useful to have a variety of bible software: a website for the creation of custom bibles, bible programs on the iphone, ipad and possibly android devices – bible software for computers.

I think I could do all of those things, but how do I do that while trying to make a living?

How do I both have a family, make a living, do the work of God on a personal level, and make things that will enable the word of God to be more easily found and used?

I think there is vast room for improvements in Bible study software. I don’t know how to navigate the publishing world though to bring my ideas to pass.

I don’t know whether publishers would welcome my ideas, or find them a threat.

Here is my little writing place – this is the place where I write

The Lord is good. He is faithful. He is wonderful. Jesus is the most good in all of creation. He is very good. He is both great and good. He is great because He is good. God was so pleased with His goodness that He made Him to be the greatest in all creation. He raised him up and gave him a place that is above every name, above every person, every thing that is in all creation, both in this world and in that which is to come.

Jesus is wonderful, and He is worth trusting totally. He is the best and most good in all of creation. He became the fulness of God in human form and He became one of us so that He could feel what we feel and experience what we experience, so that He could be a faithful high priest, able to intercede for our weaknesses. He is a good God and a faithful friend. What other god in any religion has made themselves known in that way? What other religion has presented a god of goodness like our Lord? Where else could one look for such a God as we have? This is a God that is out of human understanding. When one looks at all the religions that have come about in human history, none display the combination of majesty and humility that is evident in the truth that is in Jesus. He abounds beyond our imaginations. He is wonderful and good and true. He is full of goodness and full of truth and full of blessing. He is full of blessings for us. He is full of desires to see us prosper. He is a good God. He is a good friend. He is a friend that was willing to lay down His life for His friends. That is the definition of love – the greatest love – that one would lay down his life for his friends.

Jesus is our best friend. He is the best friend you could have. He is both the best in the since that He is the best, most good, greatest in all creation, and he is our friend. He is our best friend in that He was willing to do beyond our other friends were willing to do – He was willing to die for us, and to suffer all the pains of the punishment for our sins, so that we could be free. That is a best friend.

The Lord wants to help

The miracles of God can bring deliverance in peoples lives. Being up front with the power of God and getting into people’s lives is the key to bringing the salvation of God to bear on other people’s issues. Presenting the deliverance of God without fear is the key to other people taking hold of the salvation of God and finding His salvation in their own lives for themselves.

The Lord can help with plans to share His deliverance. He is not unwilling to offer guidance. There is nothing He wants more than for people to take hold of the deliverance that is in Christ and to be made right with God. God wants all to come to repentance and is not willing that any should perish. He desires all men to be saved. He wants people to see the salvation of God. He is eager for them to call out to Him.

God is eager to set up situations that would allow his children to proclaim the salvation of God, and to allow his children opportunities to demostrate His power for the benefit of others that He wants to know Him.

God saved a church that could share His praise for the purpose that others could hear His praise and believe and find His deliverance and be brought into His people also.

The Lord is gracious to all, and He wants all to be able to partake of His graciousness. And He is willing to help those who are of His people to go about finding ways to be able to share the goodness of God in other people’s lives. He is interested in helping his people both share his deliverance with those who don’t know Him and with those that do already, but still need his help in greater ways.

I have a Shepherd

Lord, you are beautiful. I love you. Jesus you are the hope of my life. I want my life to be in you. I want your life to be in me. There is nothing else in this world worth giving my life to. Jesus you are worth everything because everything is contained in you. All things were made through you and without you nothing was made that has been made. I love you Jesus, thank you for coming into my life. Thank you so much for making yourself a part of me and giving your Holy Spirit to live in me so that you would be with me. Thank you for all your goodness. Thank you for all your love. Thank you for all that you have given me. Thank you that you have not left me helpless but have made yourself my protector and shepherd. Thank you that I am no longer a sheep without a shepherd, weary and scattered, but I have a strong protector from the enemies and trials of this life. Thank you that you are in all ways good. Thank you that you are a good God and a faithful friend.

Thank you Father for being willing to send your only son Jesus to save me and to set me free from all my bondages, bondages which I brought on myself and made myself subject to. Thank you for breaking me free of bondages, and that you desire me to be free of every bondage. Thank you that you as a father want to see me free. Thank you that it is your heart that your children have good things in our lives. Thank you that it is your desire that we have all the goodness of God in our lives. Thank you that you desire the best for us. Thank you that you are not keeping anything back from us. But you who gave your only son for us, how will you not also with him give us all things. Thank you for all the goodness that is in you, Father. Thank you that you want to make it all available to us.

I love you Lord. You love me more than I love you. You love me so much that I cannot conceive it with my natural mind. Thank you that you make it evident even to my heart that You love me. Thank you that your Spirit testifies of Your love in my life.

Teachability

Lord, you are good.

I think that there are many things you want to teach me that I would like to know. I would like you to continue to try to teach me until I actually get them.

I want to be able to say that I have learned from you and I have been teachable. Give me a humble heart that is willing to be taught.