2010-04-25

Morning, Sunday Apr 25, 2010

Lord, you are good. You bought me out of darkness and gave me a new life. You redeemed me when all I cared about was evil. You offered me a life where goodness could be. You have delivered me from torment. You have delivered me from bondage. You have given yourself to me, and have come to live inside me.

I love you Lord. I want you to have your way in me. I want to trust you. I want to trust in your change in my life. I want to trust that all my needs can be met by trusting in you. You can meet not only my physical needs, but also my spiritual needs and my needs to change and to grow into your likeness.

Help me to grow in obedience. Help me to grow in hearing your spirit. Help me to grow in obedience to your spirit.

God, you are worth all of me. You are worth everything that is in me. You are worth me trusting in you to fulfill in your best way all my hopes and dreams. You are looking for my best. You are looking for the best of your children. You are looking for the best for your children.

Jesus, you are good and worthy of praise. You are the way, the truth, and the life. You are full of life. Your ways are full of life. If I would live in your ways, I would be full of life.

God you have a kingdom you have offered to us. Let me put your kingdom first. Let me live my life for the benefit of the kingdom you have offered to us. Your kingdom is not of this world. and if I am living for your kingdom, I will not be living for this world. Help me to live not for this world but for your kingdom.

Help me to be content to enjoy the grace you give me and have given me without wishing for anything else.

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2009-11-07

Thoughts on blog engines

What I want is a blog engine that will give me a scalable but easily portable site. My current thought is to either use mostly static files or a small fast single file database like sqlite. I do want to be able to have things like comments available but I think I would like them to be cached statically rather than being appended at page load.

I’ve looked at nanoblogger but it feels like it’s become a little heavyweight for what want. I’ve looked at vee but it seems a little too minimal. I could use nanoblogger and just not deal with the extra features. Or I could try to build my own implementation (Probably using Tcl). Another possibility is to use Blogger’s ability to export a static site, but I think trying to work in enhancements might be hard to do if I’m using a closed system for the initial static generation.

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2009-11-06

Thinking about change

I’m thinking about changing back to nanoblogger as my blog engine. I need to have a website anyway to host projects I might work on. And if I’m going to have my own webserver running, I might be happier using software that I can configure the way I want to.

I’ve always liked nanoblogger and would be happy to be running it again.

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2009-06-09

Catchup

It has been far too long since I have posted last.

Programming Languages of the Moment:

  • Factor – a stack based language reminisent to me of the the language of the HP calculators I grew up with. It is roughly analogous to Forth as Java is to C. That is, it is a high-level object based language rather than a low-level bit oriented language. I like the way stack based languages deal with data flow. If you look at it the right way, it is possible to think about data flow much the same way it works in shell script filters, where data is passed from one function to the next implicitly.

  • Haskell – one of the most mathematically oriented languages I’ve seen. I really like how much it feels like the kind of mathematics I dealt with studying set theory. It feels like it could deal with really hard problems.

I’m kind of looking at both at the same time. It’s a little hard for me to say where I would use each at this point. Factor is easier to play with, but I’m not sure if I trust it to be as maintainable as Haskell. Both seem like great languages, and both will let you get stuff done with far fewer lines of code than languages like C and Java.

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2009-05-05

Hope

From a journal entry I wrote to myself:

Hope in God. Put your hope in God. Why so downcast O my soul, put your hope in God. For He is your hope and your redeemer. He is the one who cares for your soul, and who will redeem you out of all evil.

The Lord is good, and those who hope in him, will not be put to shame.

What ways do I need to hope in God that I have not done?

How many ways have I cheated myself out of the joy of God by not putting my hope in God and allowing hope to open the door to the work of God in my soul and to the blessing of God in my life?

Why have I let despair take the place of hope? Why do I let myself fear instead of hope? How much would I see come to pass if I would hope instead of fear?


Learning

I would like to be trying to learn (about?) at least 1 new thing each day.

Here are some of the things I’ve been trying to get a handle on:

  1. Flamenco guitar (this will take a while) This seems to be a pretty decent site:

  2. Org-mode for Emacs A planner/information manager mode for the Emacs text editor. It looks like it can also be used for website authoring, so I’m interested in that.

  3. IDO mode for Emacs ("Interactively Do things") basically an enhanced buffer/file navigation mode like iswitch-b mode for Everything

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2009-05-02

Foolishness and Riches

The turning away of the simple shall slay them,
and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them.

Beware if you are a fool and become rich. You will have the power to do yourself all kinds of harm.

The one who turns aside from wisdom will bring themselves death. But even if it looks like you are prospering, this does not mean you are walking in wisdom or are out of danger. For prosperity offers the one who doesn’t know wisdom numerous opportunities to put himself into situations that would bring destruction – that he would simply never have had the opportunity to encounter were he poorer.

You cannot judge your condition by your circumstances. It must be – are you following the Lord and finding yourself in him.

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2009-04-18

How to Help

People have real hearts and real struggles and real pain, beyond the ability of my trite answers to help.

Only God has the power to really answer people’s needs.

I need to learn how to point people to God for their answers, or learn how to go to God on their behalf to get answers that can really help them. And I need to learn how to go to God, to help others break through to God so that they can get the help they need.

I can say all the things that have helped me, but outside of people taking hold of God themselves, my answers are really useless.


Dallas Guitar Show

Getting ready to go to the Dallas Guitar show.

Will I escape unscathed?

Things that could cause me to come back with much less money:

  • Ovation 12 string (If I see one, I will probably get it)
  • Gretsch hollow body (I’m a sucker for these, even though I think my Strat sounds better and plays better.)
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2009-04-17

We are not Careful

Hebrews 12:4

You have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin

Exodus 14:12

Is not this the word that
we did tell you in Egypt, say-
ing, Let us alone, that we may
serve the Egyptians, For it
had been better for us to serve
the Egyptians, than that we
should die in the wilderness.

Here is the contrast between the heart of the follower of God and the follower of the world. The follower of the world would rather serve sin than die. The follower of God, is willing to resist unto blood (dying) to avoid sinning.

The writer of Hebrews, comforts the reader with the thought that things had not yet gotten bad enough where they had to resist unto death, but that is ultimately the call if necessary.

However, our striving is not a turning against ourselves, but a standing in God, regardless of the outcome. The Hebrew children at the time of Daniel, when threatened with being burned alive if they did not worship another than God, responded,

"We are not careful to answer you in this matter"

They did not care if they were to live or die, their heart was to serve their God. We need to have the same carelessness in our love for God. It is only this radical acceptance of the love of God and careless response to that love that allows us to really overcome in our lives and see the victory of God in our lives over sin.


Server Ubuntu?

For the moment it looks like I will be using Ubuntu 8.10 as my distribution of choice for my test and stable servers. I don’t have a really good reason for choosing this over Debian 5.0, just a feeling at this point that maybe Ubuntu will be more up to date without a lot of work in Debian to point to testing or unstable. However, Debian would almost certainly be the more stable choice, so if I start to run into problems, I may have to revisit my selections.


C++ , Python

Languages of the moment: C++, Python

There are several ways that C++ and Python seem to be a well matched pair of languages to me:

  1. They seem similar enough in philosophy (Multi-paradigm, procedural, object-oriented) that algorithms and designs developed in one language would fairly easily transfer to the other.
  2. It seems reasonable possible (not necessarily easy) to call code from C++ in Python or Python in C++.
  3. C++ has the advantage of speed of execution, Python has the advantage of speed of development.

Books I’d like to (re)read

Christian:

  • Hind’s Feet for High Places

Technical:

  • Programming – Principles and Practice using C++
  • Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
  • The C Programming Language

C++

Language of the moment: C++

Book of the moment: Programming – Principles and Practices using C++


Perfect Love casts out fear.

This is a promise from the book of I John.

The full verse is:

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out
fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth
is not made perfect in love.

- I John 4:18

If you are afraid, that is an indication that you are not taking hold of love in some way.

If you are afraid, what are you afraid of?

What are you allowing to come between you and an understanding of what true love is?


Help, I’m blogging and I can’t stop

I had forgotten what a distraction blogging can be if I’m in the right(wrong) mindset.

I can see this easily becoming quite the time sink.

This is especially ludicrous given that I am my only audience at this point.


2 B(logs) or not 2 B(logs)

Maybe it would make sense for me to have two blogs (or three, or four…).

I could have one related to technology topics, and one related to personal topics. Not sure whether I would like to keep them separate or not.

It’d be more work possibly to maintain two different blogs, but maybe less boring for someone that was only interested in one of the two topics.


Happy Day!

I found a backup of the Verde Text editor on one of my old laptops.

Since this text editor is the most full featured of the ones I have designed over the past few years, it was good to find a copy. I had thought that when I let my various websites and servers go down last year, that I had lost the source code. Even though I don’t use this editor on a regular basis anymore, it’s still good to have around. It’s still one of the most comfortable editors I’ve used. And it’s actually probably just as extensable as Emacs or Vim (though much less feature complete at this point).

It does have architectural limitations (compared to Emacs especially). Since I used a tabbed interface, and Tk Text widgets as the "buffers", there is a finite number of tabs that can be accommodated with the current interface.


Where to host blog?

Now that I have new server instances running, I am faced again with the question of whether to host my blog on my server, or to continue to use blogger. There are pros and cons to each.

My Server:

  • could use nanoblogger, which I think is a neat blog engine.
  • total control over look and feel.
  • easy integration into whatever other website stuff I want

Blogger:

  • Easy to log into from anywhere (work)
  • No more setup

Linode

I have just spun up two virtual private servers at .

So far, I have to say I am incredibly impressed with their service and setup.

It’s so much easier dealing with a virtual server than a dedicated server, especially when it comes to testing things out. Whereas I had to be conservative when working with a real server, with these new virtual instances, I can try things out easily. For example, over the past three days I have played with the following Linux distributions:

  • CentOS
  • Debian 5.0
  • Ubuntu 8.4 LTS
  • Ubuntu 8.10

It takes about 10 minutes or less to switch out the base distribution. Of course after that is the apt-get/rpm dance to get all the packages you want.

Once I settle on a distribution, I plan to keep one instance as the stable server, and use the other as a test environment.

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2009-03-25

Hi

Hello World!


Blogger + "It’s all Text" + Emacs

Playing around with editing blog posts in Emacs


Emacs Setup

I’ve been messing around with setting up Emacs on my new laptop today (one of the two text editors I know how to use well). So far I have the following working:

  • integration with Blogger via "I’ts all Text"
  • integration with Oracle via sql-oracle mode and sqlplus
  • integration with WinSCP for remote file editing

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