Many evangelical churches (my own included) teach eternal security, otherwise known as once saved always saved or perseverance of the saints. I’ve been thinking about this teaching recently and came across a dilemma. I hope someone can help resolve this for me.
Eternal Security basically says that once you have been saved, you can’t be unsaved. [...]

I recently decided my son Micah should be introduced to programming. He’s 9 now and being the son of a geek needs to know more than how to play games. I did a little research and found some useful learning tools.
I discovered a free online book called, “Snake Wrangling for Kids.” This is a great [...]

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.

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…

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

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 [...]

I just spent about 3 hours trying to figure out a bug in Firefox. Pages on our newly redesigned site were not printable - they run off the bottom of the page without going to the next page.
The problem? Most of the document is contained within a div that has position set to absolute. Setting [...]

Hey all of you guys out at the IT Roundtable at Granger today. I wish I could be there but I’ve got a tight deadline on an upcoming release of our main product and can’t afford to lose a day of work here at my day job. Have fun and I hope to hear about [...]

Start with part 1.
Now here comes the fun part - getting a thin client to boot. Here are the simple steps I went through.

ssh -X 192.168.0.101 (the future LTSP server)
gksudo synaptic
search for ltsp
choose ltsp-server-standalone, click apply.  (Alternately skip the entire synaptic thing and: sudo apt-get install ltsp-server-standalone)
sudo ltsp-build-client (according to the Ubuntu LTSP Quick Install [...]

Start with part 1.
I finally got this machine setup in my basement. Since I don’t actually need physical access to the machine during configuration I just put it in my tool room next to the furnace. I had to hook up a monitor to it to get it ready for remote connections.
The first thing I [...]

Start with part 1.
Question 4: If we don’t need to follow the 10 commandments, then what are we supposed to follow? Is there a different covenant for us?

One thing the Old Testament was designed to teach us is that individual human beings cannot follow long lists of rules, regulations, and guidelines. The Old Testament devotes [...]

World’s Most Powerful Linux System.

Last night Micah succeeded at his first bike ride (see video) without training wheels. We're proud of him. I promised him a new bike once he made this step so we'll be going shopping sometime in the next couple days.

This is truly bizarre. Most people who have never used Blender find Blender's interface anything but intuitive. Those who have used it for a while tend to love it.
Now Alexander Ewering has forked Blender to create a desktop publishing application with a Blender style interface. It's called DTPBlender. Now that is truly cool. Sorry, no [...]

At Mathematical Reviews we review mathematical research papers. We sometimes invite authors of papers to become reviewers. It turns out that a dead author got invited to become a reviewer.
I was charged with modifying the application that allows our editors to invite authors to become reviewers. I looked through our data dictionary trying to [...]

It's Friday so…

Full-screen windows - Why have windows if you're going to make all your applications full screen. DOS was good enough. Most average users I know do this the instant they sit down at a computer. Arggghhhh!
Low resolution - I've had many people request that I change their monitors back to 800×600 - "The [...]

After playing around with Alfresco some more, I concluded that my previous thoughts on its CIFS (i.e. SMB) feature were not entirely fair.
Yes, while browsing through the filesystem I've mounted from Alfresco, the CPU get's pegged. I really don't like that. There were some comments on the forum that this is a known issue and [...]

This is demented, but good for a laugh. Very Pythonesque.
Dead Puppies

In our last meeting for Crossroads' web design process, we discussed Andy Stanley's 3 questions (see Web Design Team Process). These questions are in fact gauges for knowing evaluating what you have produced. Think of each question as something akin to a speedometer or tachometer.
You need to find your own gauges. We decided that Stanley's [...]

This story is unusual. Usually you hear stories of people migrating from Windows to Linux. Here’s an interesting story of a teacher reformatting all her classroom Macs and migrating to Linux.
Link: Switching art students to GNU/Linux
(We Linux people are hardware agnostic. Buy what you want. We’ll run Linux on it.)

Link: Pete Bishop: Tagged. I’ve been tagged by Pete. I guess I’m supposed to cough up the following information…
Four other jobs I’ve had:

C programmer for Simulation Resource, Inc.

system Administrator at Andrews University CS department
computer lab assistant at Andrews University
Music department assistant at Union Springs Academy

Four movies I can watch over and over:

The Lord of the [...]

Link: STLtoday - Business - Columnists.
The company employs a concept known as “Twenty Percent Time,” whereby every Google engineer is encouraged to spend 20 percent of their working time developing ideas that interest them, not just those affiliated with larger projects. The Google News headline compiler and Gmail Web-based mail program (now available to anyone) [...]

Here’s my (probably) final KC and The Flip animation.

I’m trying out youtube, which seems to be pretty cool. I was using videoaddon to do the previous videos in my blog. Videoaddon on is cheap (about $5/mo), but YouTube is free. The concepts are a bit different though. YouTube is a video sharing site like Flickr [...]

Link: LinuxElectrons™ - Novell Linux To Be On 1600 Indiana High School Desktops.
This is where Linux needs to go to win mindshare. If the students of today use Linux, the professionals of tomorrow will.