I finally started working on Sheepology again. I decided that the next order of business is a content management system (CMS). I have spent the last couple months working with Ellington and Jazbox here at the Naples Daily News and have developed strong feelings about these systems and consequently a vision for something better. Coupling this knowledge with my experience of Joomla and Bricolage, I think I have a pretty good idea of what a good CMS should be. (Bricolage is by far my favorite CMS, but not very friendly). And hey, Django was designed as a framework for building content management systems, so I’ve already got a good start.

In addition, the church I am attending has a strong need for a new website. I would like to use Sheepology to do that. Initially the integrated CMS will be simple so that I can get something out the door, but I do have a vision for something larger.

All that said, without thinking about it I packed away my desktop computer into my trunk to free up space on our camper’s kitchen table. Shari got a laptop and I decided that we no longer needed to have the whole desktop taking up all that space. So before I thought to commit my changes I tore it all down.

Thankfully we should close on “our” house by the end of July and all will be well.

I have an opportunity to play with an Amazon Kindle 2 for a while. I’m not supposed to buy any books since it’s on the company card, but there are oodles of free books out there.

I’m a big fan of Christian Classics Ethereal Library CCEL, so I wanted to see if I could get any of their books onto this Kindle. It turns out that many if CCEL’s books are available in the online store for a nominal fee, but having been mandated not to buy anything I decided to see if I could go a different route.

I started out by downloading a PDF from CCEL and trying to convert that. That was not as easy as I thought it would be. You’re supposed to be able to send an email to a service on Amazon and have it converted, but apparently my address was not approved for that. So I installed Calibre. That actually worked pretty well. It converted the PDF to a .mobi file and then I was able to drag it onto the USB Kindle “drive.” Unfortunately, the formatting is really not that great.

It turns out that the easiest way to do this is to simply use a plain old .txt file. CCEL has .txt files for everything so I downloaded one (Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History) and stuck it on the Kindle. Really bad formatting. No biggie because it’s just a .txt file. I can mangle it all I want with Python or Perl. So I put this little script together and it makes a very readable book on Kindle.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import re,sys

for line in file( sys.argv[1] ):
    if re.match('\s+$',line):
        print '\n'
    else:
        # shrink strings of spaces to one
        line = re.sub('[ ]+',' ',line).strip()
        # shrink strings of repeating characters
        line = re.sub(r'(.)\1{39,500}','\n'+r'\1'*40+'\n',line)
        print line,

I’ve been using a Mac now for a week. This is the first time in my life that I’ve actually used a Mac for anything serious or for an extended period of time. I vowed to give it a chance for at least a couple weeks before I install Ubuntu.

The hardware is exceptional. I have a 17″ MacBook Pro with 4G ram and about 300G disk. The screen is beautiful, the touchpad is the only touchpad I’ve every gotten along with, and surprisingly the chicklet keyboard isn’t as bad as I expected. The aluminum case is a thing of beauty.

I am getting used to it. In fact, I could probably exist in the Mac world OK. That is to say that it is tolerable. Tolerable requires a good shell (that rules Windows out) and a good scripting environment including such things as Python and Perl. Those come bundled on a Mac. Tolerable also requires something like Spaces (something that Linux/Unix has had since the early 90s). While Windows doesn’t come bundled with something like Spaces, I know that there are add-ons that can do something similar. Tolerable requires easy access to tools like ssh, ftp, sshfs, etc. While that doesn’t quite rule Windows out, most of the Windows based tools that provide that functionality are sub-par and barely tolerable.

So yes, I can get along on a Mac. That does not mean it’s ideal.

I have 3 chief complaints with Mac OS. One, easy access to open-source software is poor. With Ubuntu almost any open-source package can be installed with a few clicks. Fink and it’s clones are sub-par. Two, it is relatively uncustomizable. That is to say I can’t set short-cut keys easily to do the things I want them to do; I can’t make the finder open files with a single click instead of a double; I can’t make the window focus follow the mouse without clicking (without buying a $15 add-on that still doesn’t work the way I want it to), etc.

And now for the biggest complaint, three, the basic premise of the UI is a throwback to the 80s. In the 80s desktop computers were a single-tasking deal. You could only use one application at a time. So at that point in time it made sense for Apple to put the application menu bar at the very top of the screen unattached to the application windows itself. That simply doesn’t make any sense anymore and it causes problems when you want to have things like focus follows mouse. Come on Apple, even Microsoft figured that one out.

So yes, I will give this Mac OS thing another week to see if I can somehow tolerate this broken UI, but I’ve already downloaded the latest Ubuntu in anticipation of my install next week. Supposedly this thing came with bootcamp…

Today is my first day at the Naples Daily News. It’s 88° here today.

I am currently in Naples Florida interviewing for a job at the Naples Daily News. Naples is what I would call a tropical paradise. It’s a bummer that there are no mountains for skiing or hiking, but it has its own beauty. Walking on the beach in shorts in March is pretty cool.

I just finished updating the Sheepology demo with the latest code. New features include:

• fully function visual group tree editor
• email

The visual editor turned out to be a very good exercise in learning Flex. The editor is now fully functional. You can drag and drop groups onto each other to create parent/child relationships. Click on a connection to delete it. Click on the X in the upper right to delete a group. There is a button for creating new groups and a way to get back to the list view. Positioning is persistent. Changes made are immediately saved to the database. It is fully interactive.

After some thought, I concluded that this might be a useful tool for managing pages in a content management system as well and I may generalize it at some future point for that purpose.

The email system is rudimentary. You can send email to one or more individuals or to a group or a group and its subgroups. It uses TinyMCE for rich-text editing. It stores a history of any email sent. And automatically BCC’s the sender. I made a short detour from the visual group editor to make this happen because I thought it would be a necessity for any church wanting to use Sheepology in production.

The next thing I will be working on is some sort of reporting system as I think that will be critical. Other items on my list of future features are:

• inventory system
• a more sophisticated contact management system
• accounting
• integrated web content management
• on-line donations
• volunteer scheduling

I’m willing to takes suggestions at this point on what people would find most useful or necessary.

I get in trouble in cycles. About 7 or 8 years ago I, through study, exited the Seventh-day Adventist church and entered the mainstream of protestant Christianity. This caused a major crisis in the Glass family. My spiritual steps go in cycles. I take a step and then settle into it for a while.

Over the last year or so I have been contemplating how to explain my thoughts on Sola Scriptura. It is not easy to explain. It is akin to trying to explain something in English to a person who only speaks Spanish. To a protestant it is as fundamental as gravity. It is so foundational to most protestant thought that protestant thought does not exist without it. It is the dividing line between protestantism and traditional Christianity.

The simple truth is that Sola Scriptura is a newfangled teaching. It was unknown to the Christians of the first century. It has only been around since Luther. It is not even supported by the scripture itself (a fatal flaw). So I was pleased to read a recent post by my favorite blogger Father Stephan. This post explains it better than I ever could.

What does this mean? It means that I can no longer in good conscience call myself protestant. What remains? The Roman Catholic West or the Orthodox East. That choice still lies ahead.

Having recently become unemployed, life is full of excitement. Thank God for the WARN act, which requires companies to pay employees for a full 2 months after announcing a company closure.

It looks very much like we will be relocating regardless of what job I take. For Sheepology that means development will be on hold for a couple months while we re-pack and relocate. Things are going to be very crazy around here for a while.

Last December I attended an evening service at a local church. During that service a young teen-aged girl sang a song I generally really enjoy – Breath of Heaven by Amy Grant. The young girl had a phenomenal voice and excellent control. She sang beautifully, but there was something wrong and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

In my head I could hear Amy singing it and I compared. There was something about the maturity in Amy’s voice that was missing in the present rendition and suddenly I knew what it was. There is something in the act of singing that you can’t really put your finger on but your soul feels.

I can’t tell you why I knew. I can’t describe musically what was different. But I could feel a difference in attitude and in the mental state of the singer. The young singer lacked humility. The most magical part about Amy Grant’s version of the song is that somehow she captures the humility present in the story of Saint Mary. The young girl in the present wasn’t singing for the glory of God with an air of humility. She was singing to impress the audience.

I have been bothered by most contemporary Christian music for some time now but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Electric guitars and drums are not what bothers me. Not all contemporary music lacks humility, but 90% of what I hear does. It is not about bringing glory to God, but glory to the singer.

Next time time you listen, don’t just listen to the words, the tune, or the rhythm. Listen to the soul of the singer. For whom does he sing? You’ll hear it in his voice and know.

Lord, teach me humility.