You can view the Tidey source on Github.

But the first column had extra stuff in it that I didn’t want in that column. Gee, I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just run a simple regular expression on that column to remove everything after the comma?

So yes, it is possible and really not very difficult to do. And here is my solution:

function stripAfterComma() {
 var range = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveRange();
 var values = range.getValues();
 var results = [];
 for( j in values ){
   var row = [];
   for( i in values[j] ){
     var new_value = values[j][i].match( /^[^,]*/ )[0];
     row.push(new_value);
   }
   results.push(row);
 }
 range.setValues( results );
}​

And Voila my spreadsheet can now be pasted into Quizlet and used to learn those vocabulary words. Have fun with the quiz.

30 6 * * * xvfb-run /home/brian/bin/scripture.py

#!/usr/bin/python

import feedparser
import os
import time

f = feedparser.parse('http://onlinechapel.goarch.org/daily-rss.asp')
for s in f['entries']:
    if 'epistle' in s.link or 'gospel' in s.link:
        os.system("firefox -P Brian -print '%s'" % s.link)
        time.sleep(5)

Using Firefox to print in this manner requires installing the Firefox Command Line Print extension.

You can follow the lectionary readings from the Saint Paul Orthodox Church website.

First, Journey to Orthodoxy was announced yesterday. The site is beautiful and is loaded with excellent and inspiring content.

And also, the Patristic Christian Theology Search Engine, which is based on the excellent work done by CCEL, but provides an innovative user interface for searching just the Fathers.

UPDATE (9:41EST):

I’d also like to draw your attention to a beta launch of a a site my employer, 5Q, developed called Church Juice. It looks like there is a lot of good information there for church communications.

I have chosen and been approved to use my 8 hours in one lump to work on adding some new features to my open-source project Sheepology. Since the goal here is to learn something, I plan to add features using technologies I haven’t used and don’t know yet.

Since this is a sprint I’ll create a list of things I want to do that is longer than what I have time for and work through the list till I run out of time. I want to have my projects planned well in advance so I won’t waste my 8rs. I also need to import some membership data before the sprint.  On my list are the following.

• Donations using Google Checkout, Paypal, or similar
• Integration with Google Apps including things like single-sign-on, contact synchronization, menu integration, etc.
• Integration with Facebook using Facebook Connect or something similar
• producing printable reports using something like Geraldo Reports
• inter-parish/diocesan communication via AMQP (see qpid or rabbitmq)

That should be quite a bit more than I can do in 8rs.

Sheepology started as a church management system, but its first purpose in this rollout is as a content management system. Over the coming weeks I will be importing membership data and beginning to use the church management aspects of it. Other content based features will also be built as we find we need them.

I am also considering renaming the project to something a little less cutesy.

Other things that need to be done before I call it beta quality are documentation and improved installation procedures.

Tidey is a tide prediction application that uses xtide to make tide predictions and provides a fun web UI.

Tidey is a 3-fold personal experiment. The goals I had/have for Tidey are:

• Build a project using pure Tornado (i.e. not mixed with Django) to evaluate it
• Practice using RaphaelJS and JSON
• See what kind of advertising revenue a simple site can generate with a small amount of work

Tornado is cool, but only for certain applications. I wouldn’t want to build an application like a church management system using Tornado. Django provides the absolutely amazing built-in admin tool that is indispensable IMHO. Tornado has no such thing. That said, Tornado is useful for certain types of applications and used in conjunction with Django could prove very useful. For this application I am using it to asynchronously run xtide in the background. The server itself is a single thread process.

Raphael JS is very cool.

Only time will tell on the advertising.

I spent about 20-30 hours on this project. I would still consider it beta.

Running this server I am able to visit http://localhost:8888/test/ numerous times while a request for http://localhost:8888/ is waiting for the command to finish. The beauty of this is that this is a single process with a single thread. With a process this light and fast, a relatively large number of applications can be crammed into a $10/mo hosted account.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
import tornado.httpserver
import tornado.ioloop
import tornado.web

class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    @tornado.web.asynchronous
    def get(self):
        self.ioloop = tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance()
        self.pipe = p = os.popen('sleep 5; cat /etc/mime.types')
        self.ioloop.add_handler( p.fileno(), self.async_callback(self.on_response), self.ioloop.READ )

    def on_response(self,fd,events):
        for line in self.pipe:
            self.write( line )

        self.ioloop.remove_handler(fd)
        self.finish()

class TestHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        self.write('this is a test')

application = tornado.web.Application([
    (r"/", MainHandler),
    (r"/test/", TestHandler),
])

if __name__ == "__main__":
    http_server = tornado.httpserver.HTTPServer(application)
    http_server.listen(8888)
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

Late last week hackers penetrated systems at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK. The CRU is considered something of a global hub for climate-change “science.” What the released email revealed is that climate scientists have been deliberately deceptive and scientifically disingenuous in their campaign to stop “climate change.” Contrary data has been concealed or even tampered with to hide evidence contrary to climate change theories.

Science in the strictest sense is the objective application of the scientific method (i.e. observation, hypothesis, testing, lather-rinse-repeat). A scientist is someone who is understood to objectively follow the scientific method. But for the average lay person science is “whatever scientists say.” The average lay person doesn’t understand the advanced mathematics behind the climate models and thus can never really understand the “science.” He has to trust the scientist to tell him what he knows. That is “science.”

In today’s world “science” is held in very high regard. Few dare to question the teachings of “science.” “Science” has produced space travel, the internet, modern health-care, and other wonders too numerous to mention. But what people haven’t realized en masse is that “science” is really a matter of faith… in scientists.

Even though we can see the evidence of many scientific successes, entire fields of “science” do not produce tangible results. The present case of climate change “science” in particular is a purely speculative theory with no possibility of proof (and consequently it does not follow the scientific method). Similar examples are string theory, Darwinian evolution, and big bang theory.

While on the one hand we are given many tangible wonders like iPhones and cars to dazzle the mind and lend “science” credibility, on the other hand we are fed unproven theories as factual doctrine.  While the wizards of science put on a wondrous show for us with all the whiz-bang gadgets, when we pull back the curtain we see only a fraud.

There is no wizard.

There is no scientist.