August 21, 2007

Religions without God

An interesting thought from "Western Civilization, Our Tradition" by James Kurth:

The rejection of the Christian faith by Western elites does not mean that they have rejected all faiths. Despite the claims and conceits of rationalists and scientists, every human being believes in some things that cannot be proven (and therefore cannot be established by reason) or that cannot be seen (and therefore cannot be established by science) and that therefore have to be taken on faith. Ever since the coming of the Enlightenment, Western elites have adhered to a variety of secularist and universalist faiths, which in effect have been religions without God.

I have been at a loss for words when it comes to explaining how non-religion is a religion itself, and Kurth may have taken care of it...

Posted by alan at 3:40 PM

August 6, 2006

A great article about women in ministry

Hopefully I'm "back" as a blogger. I'm going to school full-time and working full-time...not leaving much "time" for everything else :-)

Either way, this is a great article a teacher recommended I read:

Women’s Service in the Church: The Biblical Basis

I'm not saying I agree with it 100%, but it does give plenty to think about...

Posted by alan at 3:58 PM

December 29, 2005

Windows XP and Ruby on Rails

Just a quick "how did I?" on making it so I could use PostgreSQL and MySQL on my Windows XP laptop with Ruby.

I was writing an application for work using the ActiveState Komodo IDE that parses e-mails in preparation for inserting them into a database. I knew that no matter how I connected to the database, I would need to do proper quoting so there wouldn't be any "surprises" with the data I inserted.

I ended up going with using a module that is part of Ruby on Rails, ActiveRecord (many of its functions automatically do the quoting). When I installed that, MySQL worked fine out of the box. For PostgreSQL I also had to also install postgres-pr.

I leveraged gem to load both. I am using the precompiled version of Ruby you can get by following the download links on their web site...and other MySQL/PostgreSQL options were complicated by their complile environment being different than mine...so anything that required a compilation was pretty much out of the picture.

Either way, without going into the specific items I tried that failed, you can read above what I did that succeeded :-)

Posted by alan at 4:42 PM

October 15, 2005

SELinux and loading dynamic Apache modules

This past week, for work, I set up a KnowledgeTree document server. It required installing MySQL, PHP, Apache, Java, and the IMAP Toolkit.

It actually went pretty well, but I did hit a wall when I went to start Apache. System Admin uses Fedora Core 4, and from what I can tell, it automatically runs with SELinux. Either way, I kept getting this error starting Apache:

Cannot load /usr/lib/httpd/modules/libphp4.so into server: /usr/lib/httpd/modules/libphp4.so: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied

Most hits I found searching on the web suggested turning off SELinux via "setenforce 0" which, I guess (based on the man page) turns SELinux into "permissive" mode.

This seemed like a bit of overkill, and searching I found this instead:

chcon /usr/local/apache2/modules/libphp4.so -t shlib_t

That did the trick...

Posted by alan at 12:09 PM

June 24, 2005

Add a company search box to Opera

I work for Tickets.com and we use a tool called Call Tracking to, of all things track stuff :-)

Either way, frequently I'm bouncing between cases, using only the case number. The main Call Tracking page has a form with a box to enter this, but it's a bit of a pain to have to keep that page open, and to switch back to it. Then it hit me, Opera probably would allow me to add it as a search dialog on my personal bar. Although it's a bit risky (because Opera doesn't support the changes, and upgrades may whack it), it sure was possible :-)

Opera 8 uses a search.ini file to define searches (if you have localized settings it'll be C:\Documents and Settings\YOURNAME\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile\search.ini). You have to choices...you can edit it by hand:

http://www.schrode.net/opera/search/search_ini.html

Or you can use the free Opera Search.ini Editor (which is what I did to make sure I didn't hose up the file).

operasearchadd.gif

After that, right-click on your personal bar and select your search engine (please note, if you don't choose a keyword, you will not be able to select it in that list). You can see how I slected it in the image above.

(One more note, replace the value in the GET query string you would normally see in your address bar with %s...that is all I did to get our simple Call Tracking URL to work. E.g. "http://.../search.cgi?target=%s" versus "http://.../search.cgi?target=87711".)

Posted by alan at 2:38 PM | TrackBack (0)