Entries in Life

I’ve been watching the brouhaha over Perl6 this week and, because I’m really, really good at procrastinating on my work, I went and downloaded Pugs again and ran the smoke test. I quickly found a few failing tests that looked relatively straightforward to fix in the Perl6 implementation of File::Util. Fixing them and adding new tests was pretty straightforward. One oddity that I wasn’t aware of: Perl6 Str objects don’t have a length property. Instead (because of the multibyte nature of Unicode), you have to ask for bytes or chars. I wonder how Perl6′s unicode support compares with Ruby 1.9′s lackluster unicode support. I would hope it would be better (since Perl5 has [some] Unicode support and Ruby 1.8 did not), but from all the Unicode experience I’ve had in the past, I can’t say I have more than hope.

For the record, I am only a poseur when it comes to my emulation of the hirsute and bespecticaled men and women who flip-flop through my profession.

Ok, it is the second day of Christmas, but still… Christ is Born! Glorify Him! If you haven’t yet gotten your fill of articles about the historicity of the account of Christ’s nativity, check out Father Stephen’s take:

And the pattern, according to a very ancient arrangement, is the same as that of Pascha, for the simple reason that the event of Christmas cannot be understood until one understands Pascha … Here the God whom the universe could not contained is contained in a Virgin’s Womb, born in a cave, wrapped in swaddling cloths and laid in a manger. At Pascha, He whom the universe cannot contain is contained in Hades (the ultimate dark cave), wrapped in fine-linen and placed in a tomb. […] None of this is to remove the events of the Gospel from history. But in the Gospels, Pascha shapes history – and not the other way around. […] But history is not the vehicle of our salvation: the Church alone has been ordained by God to be such a vessel. The radical historicization of Scripture is another part of the leveling of Reformation radicalism, seeking to democratize what God has not put in the hands of every man.

Via Jim’s shared items feed, comes this Kurt Vonnegut quote:

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon?

This reminds me of the discussion I had with the Mennonites recently where they said that many Mennonites claimed to fall back on the Beatitudes as the lens through which all scripture was interpreted. “Jesus clensing the temple contradicts ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’, so I think we can agree he was wrong to whip the money changers.” Anyway, last night before I read the above Vonnegut quote, I came across a video titled “A Christian’s Battle Cry”. It starts off with an awesome quote — I came not to bring peace, but a sword — and continues with a montage of unlikely sword wielders and men and women shouting what I guess are supposed to be inspiring phrases (“I WILL STAND BY MY BROTHERS IN ARMS! MY ENEMY WILL COWER!”). Do Evangelicals have a middle ground? Something other than push-over Jesus or sword-fighting Jesus?

I am just beginning my fourth Discworld novel (Going Postal), and find out today that Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer’s. In a postscript to the announcement, he writes:

I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as ‘I am not dead’. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think – it’s too soon to tell. I know it’s a very human thing to say “Is there anything I can do”, but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

First, the reconstruction from his relics that the Discovery Channel did: And now, an icon from around the 10th century: Source

I have been having a lot of fun with my Launchpad PPA. In addition to org-mode, I’ve packaged color-theme and a snapshot of the Unicode+XFT branch of Emacs using the package name emacs-xft-snapshot so it doesn’t conflict with existing packages. I also put a package for PHP’s Xdebug (which does a decent job of profiling PHP code and can be used to make pretty call graphs) and one for eMusic/J.

I tend towards apathy and cynicism when it comes to national politics. Part of the reason is that I’ve gotten too tired to care. “Habeas corpus went the way of the Dodo? Torture is ok? And people aren’t rioting in the streets? I give up!” Over the past twelve years, I’ve gotten increasingly frustrated with the direction of government. Sure, I blame Bush for a big part of this, but Clinton also wanted to increase presidential power. And, until recently, I didn’t have any hope that the next president would even talk about rolling back the power that executive branch has gathered for itself. Back before we were in Iraq or Afghanistan, I remember thinking I was alone in a sea of patriotic nut jobs. Everyone seemed ready to attack anyone who could conceivibly be connected with the terrorist attack. I thought about Bush’s promises to avoid Clinton’s “Nation Building” and noticed how few people really cared about that. Then I started hearing a little about this Ron Paul guy. A candidate that really wants to restrict the federal government and not just grow it in a different way? Un-Possible! But still, he was a third-tier candidate. In other words, he had no chance in Hell of winning the presidency, let alone the Republican nomination. So when his supporters managed to put together a fund-raiser that raked in four million dollars in a single day, I thought, “Hey, maybe a kook can make it after all!” And his supporters have continued to put their money where their mouth is. So far, his fourth-quarter contributions have beaten the other Republican candidates third-quarter takes. And we still have a month to go. If he continued raising money like this, he could hit $15 million for the quarter. Still, I’m realistic about the chances of Ron Paul actually implmenting much of his platform. For example, he talks about taking our troops out of South Korea, but the last president to do that (Carter) was finally thwarted on that very issue. North Korea is a lot less of a threat to the South now, so I mention that only in passing: idealists like Ron Paul and Carter make big promises, but have lots of trouble following through because of the amount of inertia they’re fighting.

Fr Stephen has written out some thoughts on American Christianity and I found this bit especially apropos after reading this post from Bruce Reyes-Chow:

The problem with this marketing approach [using different sorts of music to attract different groups to your church] is only beginning to reveal its flaws (apart from the theology behind it): America is becoming increasingly fragmented in its music styles. Thus Churches, or at least services, are having to be multiplied to meet the growing diversity of the market. … Someone asked me once (actually more than once) what St. Anne (my parish) does to grow. I answered simply: “We answer the phone.” I cannot explain where the converts come from, though there is a slow but steady stream… The faith remains the same whether the “market” is a village in Africa or a suburb of Los Angeles. It is thus truly “inclusive” and “universal” in the extreme.

The comments become pretty interesting. Especially since my church has Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, Stewardship drives, study groups, etc — all things that converts poo-poo in the comments as “too American.”

I’ve been reading Terry Pratchett recently. I suppose you could say this is like reading through John Grisham’s œuvre, but he writes funny, entertaining books that are hard to put down. And he doesn’t divide them into chapters. So I have a hard time stopping. I also discovered that much of Akira Kurosawa’s work in film is in the public domain and available from the Internet Archive. I just finished Ikiru (To Live) and he really got me in the end. Thought he was going for easy, but he didn’t.