philcrissman.com

I did something I haven’t done in awhile; I just threw the word “Linux” into news.google.com to see what would come up. These looked interesting.

RHEL 5 Due before March 2007: Looks like the next Red Hat Linux, based on a 2.6.18 kernel and including Xen virtualization (ability to run multiple operating systems) is due before March. The article also points out, correctly it would seem, that recent potential threats from Novell and Oracle have not seemed to materialize any significant dent to Red Hat’s business.

Linux In 2007, in general: Internet News has what looks like a high level overview of what we’re looking forward to in the Linux world next year, including mentions of the new GPL, the hopeful end of the SCO fiasco, new kernels, new distros, and a non-statement about the effects Vista will (or won’t) have on Linux adoption next year. (For the impatient, they suppose that Vista’s effect on Linux adoption may not be apparent until at least 2008… they could be right about that. It sounds good, anyways.)

And some guy says he’s put Linux on a Zune. Only reason I’ve heard so far to get one; if this is perfected, I may just get one of the many that are sure to be available on ebay for about $10 bucks in the near future.

Just noticed How To Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Ruby listed on del.icio.us/popular.

So, this is interesting. I have not yet begun to really dig in to Ruby, but I’m seeing a lot of good reasons to do so; the main reason being that I’m interested not just in using it to write programs. I’m interested in why people are interested in it.
Continue reading ‘Ruby Edition of How To Think Like a Computer Scientist’

I’ve noticed that every once in awhile in Gmail, and even other Google apps, when I have completed an action, there will appear briefly a little message in the status bar saying “read aanandprasad.com”. I found I could reliably reproduce this simply by deleting an email; the message “read aanandprasad.com” would appear in the status bar right after doing this.

Aanand seems to be a web developer with some nifty Javascript on his site, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why Gmail wants me to visit him.

Has anyone else seen this?

UPDATE: My best guess is that Google is using a bit of Javascript from Aanand’s page and is linking directly to it, so really what is happening that Firefox is simply telling me to wait while Google reads from it’s source. Now, why link directly to this page, I don’t know. Doesn’t Google have enough server space?

I may be talking a bit more about some specific issues regarding Christianity, Bible study, and church for awhile.

One reason why is that I’ve recently felt the need to leave a church that I’ve been attending for six years — almost the entire time I’ve lived in Minnesota. There are a lot of things churning around in my mind, and I think that a lot of them are going to find their way to print… here, at least.

I’m not a person who is wont to hop from church to church; I accept that no place is perfect, so if there are little things in a church that I have some small disagreement with, I ignore them. These things are usually small, non-essential, and easily overlooked, and all churches will have them, so there is no point in leaving over them. (Someone once said that there are no perfect churches, because they all have people in them… that’s somewhat pithy, but a good point.) The more important thing is that a body of believers is working together to reach their community, and hopefully beyond, with the gospel.

I clarify this just to say that I’m not someone who’s going to jump ship the first time something rubs me the wrong way. The only reason I could have for leaving a church is if something came up which I believed was seriously wrong, and which could not be ignored (this assuming it’s a good church to begin with, which ours was, and in many ways still is).

I’m not going to list possible reasons to leave a church, but in our case it was an issue of doctrine, and not a small one, but one intimately related to salvation. Not only that, but it gradually became a major platform, an issue about which there could (apparently) be no disagreement — if we were to stay, we were expected to be on the same page, or to at least keep our mouths shut.

I’m not going to talk about the issue of doctrine specifically, in this post, though I may later on.

Suffice it say that after much study, thought, and prayer, I came to the conclusion that this particular issue:

• Represented a major error in Bible interpretation.
• Was not a minor issue which could be ignored.
• Was not something that I could accept and continue to attend the church.

I did not expect to need to make a decision like this. I’m more sad about it than I expected to be; I have a lot of friends at the church, most of which I will hopefully be able to keep as part of my life.

One last point; in Acts 17:10-12 we are told about Paul’s visit to the Bereans. They are lauded for the way that they studied the Bible diligently. We sometimes miss is the fact that their specific reason for studying was to determine whether what Paul was saying was true or false.

Think about that; if you proposed to start a Bible study in your church to determine whether or not the Pastor’s messages were correct, what sort of response would you get?

The Bereans were commended for this.

Interesting.

Part of me wants to grumble about how long it is taking for Gravatar to get their system back in full gear….

However:

• They are doing a lot of work, and for free.
• They are hosting almost 100,000 gravatars, again, for free.
• This is almost definitely a side project (ie, not a full time job) for the maintainer(s), something done in their spare time.

In light of all that, I’d feel like a bit of a jerk to actually complain. ;-)

I’ve been wanting to change my gravatar icon for a little while, though; I chose the Gentoo “g” because that was my favorite Linux distro for a very long time. However, it’s been quite awhile since I used it, and I’ve thought of changing the avatar to something else… but I guess I’ll have to wait until the system is in full working order.

Tons of kudos to the Gravatar team for all their work; I look forward to seeing the new system when it’s operational.