If I were in the mood to develop a new Church Management System, Google App Engine is the platform I would likely use.

If you’re from Crossroads and are interested in training for the Chicago Marathon you are invited to join our group on MapMyRun.

I use two tools that are a lifesaver in regards to browser testing. Wine and Browsershots.

One annoying thing about Internet Explorer is that once you upgrade to a later version of it, you can’t use the previous version. This means you basically have to have a different machine for each different browser version. Wine running on Linux allows me to have both IE 6.0 and 5.5 installed and running side-by-side. IE 7.0 doesn’t work yet, but I have a separate machine I can use for that.

For all else I use Browsershots. It is an amazing free service that will render any public webpage on an extensive list of browsers and operating systems.

Now I’ve done it. I signed up for the Chicago Marathon. I’ll likely be blogging about it over on Through the Cooking Glass.

Now I’ve just got to convince Pete to do it…

I’m getting ready to roll out Crossroads‘ new website and one of the last things on my list was to make a mirror of our content management system (which is on a different system than the public facing server) so that if the production one goes down I can easily switch over to the backup.

I was beginning to look into doing a duplicate installation of Bricolage on my desktop machine at home (which is actually beefier than the server),  but because of the fact that I’m running different releases of Ubuntu, it would have been somewhat difficult.

Enter VirtualBox. I considered Qemu and VMware as well. VMware, while cool, isn’t open source, so was lower down my list. Many reviewers seem to like the ease of VirtualBox and ease was what I was looking for so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

After a little reading I came up with this single line to extract the live image from the disk, move it to my desktop machine, and convert it to a 20G VirtualBox image:

sudo dd if=/dev/hda | ssh brian@10.0.0.100 vboxmanage convertdd stdin bric.vdi 21474836480

A while later…

I run virtualbox and create a machine, specifying my bric.vdi as the primary master disk. It boots up and I have a backup server I can run if I need one.

Getting networking going was a bit more involved. I had to follow the directions in the manual for creating a network bridge and such, but the instructions are very clear and work.

Initially I used the version of VirtualBox in the Ubuntu repositories, but I couldn’t get that one to work with the host based networking and bridging. I installed the version from VirtualBox’s site and it works great.

Stay tuned for a series on the hows and whys of how we developed our new site…

Most people who read my blog are geeks. My guess is that most of them are church geeks like myself who either volunteer or work full time doing IT work for their churches. I think we’re a pretty diverse group as far as denominations go, but I would guess that the largest contingent of church IT geeks who occasionally visit my blog come from some sort of evangelical protestant background. I do know that there is at least one representative from Orthodoxy (hi Andrew) and I recall communicating with at least one Roman Catholic IT geek. I myself belong to an evangelical quasi-Baptist church after having made an exodus from Seventh-day Adventism.

One thing I have noticed is that we as a group tend to talk mostly about geeky things even though we identify ourselves as Christian geeks. I’d like to change that. Geeks need other geeks to discuss theology with.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about tradition (see my food blog) and its tremendous value. I have thought much about what protestants threw out in the protestant reformation and why we did so. There seem to be three groups (Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and to a degree Anglican/Episcopal) that retain ties to the traditional heritage of the church. Most others seem to have discarded it without reservation.

The dividing line seems to be the protestant doctrine/teaching of Sola Scriptura. That is, that doctrine should be established purely from the written word of God and not from the traditions, oral or otherwise, of the church. That the written word of God is a tradition kept on paper rather than in our hearts, minds, practices and speech is often left unsaid. At this point I’m not even sure that such a doctrine can be supported scripturally (which would be a fatal flaw). It even seems that Sola Scriptura could be blamed for the creation of heresies like Seventh-day Adventism.

Now I am not saying that I think Catholicism or Orthodoxy are perfect and that we protestants should all jump ship. I believe the reformation was an important and necessary event. But however much benefit it has brought, it has caused at least as much damage. The church is in a multitude of fragments and there is not much that can be done to put the pieces back together. As Paul said in Romans 16:17, “I urge you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them.”

My intention is not to cause division among us, but I would like to hear from like minded geeky individuals from other backgrounds on why Sola Scriptura does or does not make sense. My hope is that as geeky IT people, your thoughts will be logical and rational.

Thoughts?

I’ve been using ScrubIT for some time now. A few weeks ago I decided to try out OpenDNS at home to see how they compare. One of the reasons for my dissatisfaction with Scrubit is that I have absolutely no control over what sites are blocked or open. Every so often some site that was perfectly clean and was something that needed to be viewed would be blocked and there was nothing I could do to fix it other than changing our DNS server temporarily. I signed up many moons ago for ScrubIT’s beta program for more fine-grained control, but I’ve never heard back from them. I decided I was tired of waiting and tried out OpenDNS.

The first and only problem I had was that within the first 4-5 hours of having registered, none of my blocked sites were actually blocked. After that initial delay I haven’t had a single problem. The fine grained control is excellent and reliability seems to be high. I will be switching the Crossroads office over to OpenDNS on my next trip to the office.

One minor tweak I made was to set my primary DNS server to OpenDNS and my secondary to ScrubIT. Both OpenDNS and ScrubIT offer secondary DNS servers, but my guess is that if one goes down, the other may too. Why not increase reliability by using a completely different provider for the secondary?

Now don’t take me wrong. I’m not knocking ScrubIT. ScrubIT has served us well for quite some time, is reliable, and does the job. In fact, I would still recommend ScrubIT for home users who don’t want the added complexity that comes with OpenDNS’s  flexibility.

Pete Bishop has posted details on the media related software we use.

Heard on this morning’s commute while listening to “The Lessons of History” by Will Durant.

Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails, the other dies.

I’ve gotten out of the habit of posting about where Crossroads is headed with IT and Web infrastructure. I’d like to get back to it. Here’s a start.

The economic situation in Michigan has really hurt Crossroads’ finances. We used to be able to throw money at stuff to solve problems. Not so anymore. We’re on a budget. A couple of years ago I had visions of a full-time IT staff (we’re still volunteer run), a server room, and all the usual things a guy like myself would have visions of. None of that came to pass.

I have fretted about disaster recovery, dependence on our internet connection, collaboration, maintenance, support, and numerous other problems, but most of those problems seem to have been solved by our webification strategy (except our dependence on our internet connection). What that boils down to is that if we can use an online application to solve a problem, we do. The ball started rolling with Fellowship One and hasn’t stopped.

Here’s a list of the online applications we use so far.

• Fellowship One - church management, check-in (not really low-budget)
• Google Apps for Domains - document storage and collaboration, calendaring, chat, email
• ScrubIt - content filtration (I’m currently evaluating OpenDNS since it has more fine-grained control).
• Google Groups - Project management. We were using Basecamp, but realized we weren’t using the milestone and to-do list features and found that Google Groups fit our need for less money (i.e. free). To-do lists and such were being managed mostly by staff and they found that the next item on this list fit the need better.
• Vitalist - “Getting Things Done” style list management
• Planning Center - Worship service planning software
• Celtx - pre-production planning. This is a hybrid, not 100% online. There are clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• GoDaddy - file sharing and domain hosting
• Jott - personal secretary. Jott in conjunction with Vitalist is pretty darn cool.

We do use a number of other applications that simply can’t be online - primarily media oriented applications. Pete Bishop will know more about those applications (e.g. Final Cut, Photoshop, MediaShout, Audacity, Gimp, etc.).

One other dirt cheap package we do use is F-Prot anti-virus. It’s not necessarily the most polished package, but it does the job for peanuts.

What a sick and demented author. She writes a great series of books that entices kids (and adults) and makes them respect a very powerful character. Then after she finishes the books and everyone has read them, she drops the bomb that Dumbledore was gay. Way to mess up a kid’s sense of morality.

Dumbledore was gay, JK tells amazed fans

See photos of my family vacation in Colorado over at my other blog.

Do you remember that class back in school in which you got put into a group of other kids and had to work as a team on a project and everyone in the team got the same grade at the end?

I seem to remember doing several of those throughout school. The one thing I recall is that without fail, 1 or 2 people in the group ended up doing about 80-90% of the work. The rest of the group was happy to give advice and wanted to be sure and have their say in how the project was done, but for the most part advice was all they contributed.

Have no fear, Hillary is here! This is how she wants to run our country. She wants to replace an “on your own” society with one based on shared prosperity and responsibility. What she doesn’t mention is that when reality sets in there will be more sharing of prosperity than of responsibility. That’s the natural order of things.

Hillary doesn’t want to admit that the CEOs who make those megabucks she wants to redistribute are the same people who create millions of jobs for the rest of us. If you break the system that allows rich corporate CEOs to exist, you break the system that creates the prosperity Hillary wants to “share.”

Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

We Are All in It Together, Clinton Says

If you are a Vim fanatic like me you will definitely want to try this awesome Firefox extension out.

The Vimperator

In this video a librarian for a small library in Vermont installs Ubuntu on two donated PC’s without an operating system. This is a really entertaining video. Read about it and watch it:

I’m a bit behind the times. I just found the first podcast I’m actually interested in listening to. Google Reader does a great job playing podcasts through a nice little flash player. Yes, I’m really behind the times. I don’t have a portable player to play it on. I just listen at my desk.

Check it out: The Fred Thompson Report

Crossroads‘ upcoming website has a prototype.

As of today, the colors, layout, and layout graphics have not been finalized. This prototype will continue to evolve. You can watch it as it evolves.

Some of the design parameters we chose for this site are:

• 16/9 aspect ratio
• more picture than text
• minimal use of flash (we use MooTools for effects)
• not too many choices all at once
• everything loads in a single page
• standards compliant
• well defined article structure

This is being generated by Bricolage on a server currently sitting in my basement. The files on the public site are flat files. We’re also planning to use Bricolage for our other publications including our newsletter. The goal is to have a single pipeline through which content flows.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

By the way, it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer yet. Get Firefox.

Oh, and the lovely lady sledding is my wife Shari.

I told Shari the other day that I was soon going to announce Crossroads‘ official new operating system. I asked her to guess what that was. Her first guess was MacOS. I said nope. She gave up.

I said, what desktop applications do you actually run? She said that on rare occasions she runs OpenOffice and often uses the desktop calculator. Other than that she couldn’t think of anything else. Almost every application she uses runs in her browser. Off the top of my head that includes Basecamp, FellowshipOne, Google Documents, Vitalist, Gmail, Google Calendar, Backpack, and Google Reader.

In an environment like this, the desktop OS no longer matters. One of Sun’s marketing slogans back in the early ’90s was, “The Network is the Computer.” That is finally true. It is not by any authority that I do this. It is a simple admission of reality.

I hereby declare Crossroads’ official operating system to be Firefox.

Oh dear. I’ve been declared a Tech Snob of the highest order by Jim Walton.

I’ll admit it. I’m a snob when it comes to tech, particularly operating systems. But I’d like to think of my comment on his blog as more of a confession than a proud boast. It’s a statement of my sinful nature.

I got to thinking. We, as ministers in “emerging” churches, are church snobs. We tend to think that the contemporary methods of doing church pioneered by the likes of Saddleback and Willow Creek are much better than the old ways. There may be some truth in that, but that doesn’t excuse the snobbery.

So how do you defeat snobbery?

I’m really loving Bricolage. In Joomla I used a pluggable component to do this, but if I had needed to write my own it would have been a major hassle. In Bricolage I can do it with just a few lines of code and a custom document type.

Every miniscule subelement of the page is templatable. In Joomla you can only have a template for an entire page. The subelements are completely controlled by the components and modules. Allowing fine-grained control makes it much easier to create standards compliant sites.

With the following template, a Bricolage user can easily create an aggregate feed and assign as many feeds to it as they want. The user sees what’s in the screen-shot. I’m using Perl with HTML::Mason, but you can also use the PHP burner if you prefer PHP.

<%perl>
use XML::RSS::Aggregate;
use HTML::Entities;
use DateTime::Format::RSS;

my $fmt = DateTime::Format::RSS->new;
my $max = $element->get_value('maxentries') || 100;
my @feeds = map $_->get_value, $element->get_fields;

my $rss = XML::RSS::Aggregate->new(
    title => $story->get_title,
    link => $story->get_primary_uri,
    sources => @feeds,

    sort_by => sub {
        my $item = shift;
        $fmt->parse_datetime( $item->{pubDate} || $item->{dc}{date} )->epoch;
    }
);

</%perl>

<h1><% $story->get_name %></h1>
<p><% $story->get_description %></p>

<dl>
%for my $item ( @{$rss->{items}} ){
    <dt><a href="<% $item->{link} %>"><% $item->{title} %></a></dt>
    <dd><% decode_entities( $item->{description} ) %></dd>
%   last unless --$max;
%}
</dl>

So we had to reboot the coffee pot this morning. It wouldn’t run.

It took calling in our Windows guy to figure it out though. Such a thing never even crossed us Linux guys minds as we go months or years without rebooting. On top of that, after the reboot, the clock had to be reset or it wouldn’t run.

We figure Microsoft is writing the operating systems for coffee pots nowadays.

I’ve heard a lot of hype about 37signals new product, Highrise. So I thought I would give it a whirl. I started reading about it before I signed up for the free edition and got curious about how it integrates with email.

It turns out that there is absolutely no LDAP support. Why in the world would you want to use a contact management package that didn’t have LDAP support? Isn’t this supposed to provide a shared address book? What are these guys thinking? There is no way I’m going to maintain both a list of Highrise contacts and a separate address book in my email program.

Now I’m beginning to understand these guys’ strategy. They charge a small fee for a little app here and a little app there, none of which make a complete tool (except maybe basecamp - though one might argue Highrise should have just been included in the next Basecamp release). In the end you end up buying all their apps to get what you need and end up paying megabucks because they nickel and dime you to death.

Basecamp  is the only one of their products I use. The rest all seem to have one or more fatal flaws. IMHO, these products are way overhyped.

Novell did a fabulous job with these.

I must confess, In my previous post about Bricolage, I had not yet finished the installation. I have now after running into a few snags.

One issue was getting Bricolage and PostgreSQL to communicate. I had missed an obscure little portion of the installation guide that said that if your PostgreSQL is configured to use ‘IDENT sameuser’ authentication, then you must use the same username for ‘Bricolage Postgres Username’ as you did for ‘Apache User’. That snagged me for a while but once I knocked it down I was on my way.

The next problem I came across was setting up the destination site. I configured a destination site with ftp access. Unfortunately, the ftp access made by Bricolage is not logged (at least as far as I can tell) and so you can’t see what is going on. It took me a while to figure out that I was using the wrong username.

Aside from poor documentation and a complex install, Bricolage is awesome. After playing around with it some more I can’t imagine a content management system closer to my ideal concept of a CMS than Bricolage. It’s ingenious.

I’ve always wondered at the idiocy of Samson when he told Delilah about his hair. The fact was that he had enough evidence to know that she would betray him if he told her the real truth. How could he be so stupid.

I finally realized that he was not stupid. Nobody could be that stupid.

The reason he told Delilah the truth is because he didn’t believe it was the truth. His sin was unbelief.