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Bible

I started using this app a few months ago. It is the best bible on the iPhone that I have found. All the major translations of the bible as well as a lot of lesser ones. Lots of different languages. The text is well displayed and easy to read. The app has day mode and low light mode.

It was actually this app that inspired (or maybe persuaded) me to read through the bible in a year. The app popped up a suggest in the end of December.

"A new year is starting, how about starting a reading plan in the new year," says Bible app.
"OK, what have you got?"

Bible has quite a few plans, divided into five categories; devotional, partial bible, topical, whole bible and youth. I was looking for a plan that would get me through the whole bible. At the head of the list is Bible in 90 Days. Now, while I am quite literate, have a fairly respectable vocabulary, I am not a very fast reader. In fact, I am pretty slow. According to the description, it works out to about 12 pages of Bible a day. Next. A plan titled Chronological. Read through the Bible in the historical order in which events occurred, according to current research.

So far, the reading plan has me going through 3 to 4 chapters a day. I started in Genesis, Adam and Eve, beginning of the world, right? Read in Genesis through Noah's boat ride. I am currently reading Job, apparently he was next.

Bible is made available by LifeChurch.tv for free. I have had no problems with the app. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in a good Bible on the iPhone.

I spent 6 years working at Apple. Those were the best years of my career.

When the .com bubble burst in late 2000, early 2001, Apple was one of the harbingers of the ensuing stock crash. In one or two days Apple's stock went from $78 a share to less than $20 a share. I believe it was in November. Apple called a meeting of employees. As everyone gathered in Cafe Macs, security personnel started moving through the crowd asking to see badges. Anyone who was not a full time employee of Apple was asked to leave and escorted out. The doors were locked, the shades were pulled.

Finally, Steve came into the cafeteria. He stepped up onto one of the low walls and began to address the crowd. Steve talked about what the senior execs believed was coming. Hard times in the tech industry. Then, he laid out the plan for how Apple would deal with it. No one will get any raises. No one will get any bonuses. And there will be no stock options. And there will also be no lay offs. Focus on your work and let us worry about the business. Do that and we will come through this, together.

Apple laid off a few people that year but nowhere near what the other tech companies were laying off. For the next two years everyone I knew in the tech industry was either looking for a job or worried about losing their job. I wasn't. There were no raises for about two years but there were no lay offs that I knew of either. Apple, under the direction of Steve Jobs, kept us all employed and working on interesting and exciting projects.

Thanks, Steve. It was one hell of a ride.

I have used Movable Type installed on my own webhost for 5 years or so. After several false starts on Wordpress I decided to make the switch. Maybe.

For several years I really liked Movable Type. I could manage the design of my web site using html and css. Movable Type took my html and css as templates to produce the final product with all of my blog entries incorporated automagically. Movable Type even permitted text files to be linked so that one could avoid the Movable Type editor altogether. The system was relatively clean and straight forward to use.

Then came Movable Type 4.2. Six Apart made some fairly radical changes to the template structure which broke existing templates during upgrade. The new template structure fragments the html into blocks - header, body, footer, sidebar, etc. It might be possible to work with the new structure in order to implement the old. I have not yet taken the time to sort it all out. 4.2 came just as I was about to head out on a military deployment to Iraq. I didn't have time to figure it all out then. By the time I returned, I'd lost interest.

I've been watching Wordpress for several years. Twice I made attempts to move my blog to Wordpress and then changed my mind. After I returned from deployment, I started looking into what I wanted to do about my blog. For several years I've been watching all kinds of cool widgets and themes coming out for Wordpress. The bit the really got my attention was the iPhone Wordpress client. I figured Six Apart would surely make one as well. Not so far. That finally motivated me to move my blog over to Wordpress and see what it is really like.

Movable Type is definitely an industrial strength weblog content manager. From a single install of MT it is relatively painless and instantaneous to set up multiple blogs with multiple users of varying access privileges. That part did indeed work very well. Up until 4.2, managing the look and feel of the various web sites on which the multiple blogs existed was also fairly simple. There was one html template for each view (main index, archive index, comment input, etc.) associated with the blog. Movable Type included some advanced features that made it really simple to reuse common elements across multiple templates. The style of the entire weblog could be managed from a single style sheet. Multiple style sheets could also be used from within the constructs of CSS. 4.2 made some radical changes to the template structure which complicated the construction and management of the html significantly, at least in my opinion. I'm sure that the folks at Six Apart are convinced that the new architecture is a vast improvement.

What then of Wordpress. Facebook integration is available through a widget. Digg integration into one's blog is available via a widget. Mobile device specific layouts that are triggered automatically are available through a widget. Flickr integration in a manner more meaningful and elegant than the gawd awful Flickr badges is available in the form of a widget. Having watched with envy as my buddies running Wordpress blogs kept getting all the cool gadgets and toys I decided it was time to get it a try.

Wordpress sets up more quickly and easily than Movable Type. The SQL setup is pretty much the same for both but installation of the Wordpress software is easier. Customizing Wordpress is both easier and significantly harder. Simpler because so many things can be customized simply by installing a widget. If the customization you want is available in a widget, adding that customization to your weblog can be done in minutes. Likewise if the customization you want is available as a theme. Most things that can be handled in modifying a style sheet are also fairly easy provided that you have a working knowledge of CSS.

Anything that does not fit into the categories mentioned above falls into the significantly harder class. Customizing the header of you blog, which is a fairly simple html and css task in Movable Type, is more complicated in Wordpress. It requires mucking around with the Wordpress php code. When I'm wearing my web designer hat, I'd really prefer to only have to work with html and css. JavaScript, php, perl and all the other languages of the web are great but it should not be necessary to fiddle with php in order to insert or change a graphic in the page layout. That's crazy. But that is what is required to peak, tweak and/or modify in any significant and meaningful way the page layout of a Wordpress weblog.

I know that there are a lot of business and corporate blogs that run on Wordpress. However, in my mind, Wordpress is excellent weblog software for non-technical to moderately technical non-professionals who want to run their own blog. I honestly believe that most of these people would be a lot happier on Squarespace or similar. But, if you really want to install and maintain your own blog software, Wordpress is a decent choice.

For web world professionals who maintain blog sites for clients I think there are better solutions available. Movable Type is an industrial strength blog engine. Once you get your head around the template architecture that they use the page layout that Movable Type can support is limited more by the skill of the designer than Movable Type.

I'm not yet ready to go back to Movable Type. I like some of the things I've been able to do with Wordpress but I do not like the hurdles involved in customizing a Wordpress layout. So, I'm exploring other weblog management systems looking for something lightweight, easily incorporated into an html CSS web site. MODx maybe. Any suggestions?

After some years of running on Movable Type, I'm switching things over to Wordpress. Wordpress is far more widely used and supported. There are more plug-ins, more templates, and just more support in general for Wordpress than Six Aparts' Movable Type. So, Six Apart, it's been good knowing you.

This is a test of Wordpress 2.0.

Smittie

I upgraded from 4.12 to 4.2. The upgrade from 3.5 to 4.12 went flawlessly. So, this should be a simple thing, right? All the templates for my blog are gone. I did exactly that same thing I did when I upgraded from 3.5 to 4.12. Copied the files to the MT4 directory on my server. Went to http://www.server.com/cgi-bin/mt4/mt.cgi. Got redirected to the upgrade cgi which appeared to proceed without incident. Once it was done, there was a button to go to Movable Type control panel. Off I went. Hum, looks OK. Let's rebuild and see what happens.
Uh oh. Error. Oooh look, edit template button, how cool is that!! Hey, that's not a template I've ever used. Better go look at the templates and see what's changed. Uh, whadda ya mean No Templates found?? That's not good.
So, that's where I'm at. I was planning to go looking for the templates. I have no idea where they are stored. My guess is the MySQL database which is where I was planning to look next. I should also point out that I cannot Create New Template from the MT Control Panel either. Which probably implies deeper problems.
I always installed from downloads on the download page at Six Apart. I had 3.52, I think, for a long time. I avoided upgrading because of this very reason. A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded 4.12 from the Six Apart download page and upgraded my install. That upgrade went off without a hitch. Hence my confidence in upgrading from 4.12 to 4.2.
All in all, a lousy upgrade experience.
So, the blog design that I liked so much is gone. Partly my fault for not making adequate backups. Mostly Six Apart's fault for not finding data loss bugs before shipping their product.
With deployment so close I do not have time to learn the new architexture of Movable Type 4.1 and then re-create my weblog design. That makes me sad. So, Minimalist Blue, as Movable Type calls it, is my new look. It's boring. I'm not sure how long I'll actually be able to stand it. But, for now....

Go to digg.com's US Elections 2008 section and scroll through the items there. All the items have over a thousand 'diggs'. What's interesting is that almost none of those articles come from any of the major news outlets. Moreover, it is very rare to find an article on Mr. McCain that is positive or an article on Mr. Obama that is negative. I also find it interesting the disproportionate number of articles from Huffington Post that get so many diggs. Are the writers at Huffington Post really that good? ThinkProgress.org also appears to get a disproportionate number of their articles on the front page of Digg.

Do you suppose that Huffington Post and ThinkProgress.org are gaming Digg.com?

aloha

[posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: politics

I really have moved Smittie's Ramblings over to Feedburner. So, if you're reading this via your favorite newsreader, please change the feed URL to http://feeds.feedburner.com/SmittiesRamblings. At some point soon, the existing non-Feedburner URL will stop working. So, please, change the URL now. Thanks.

aloha

[posted with ecto]

This is classic. The music industry is what it is today because of AM and then FM radio. That was the primary means of discovery of new music. The recording industry understood this. That is why the radio stations are allowed to play music without royalties.

The dinosaur thrashes more violently as it sinks deeper into the tar pit. In the end, it will only die tired as a result but it will still die.

read more | digg story

[posted with ecto]