Monthly Archives: February 2007

I don’t go to church because…

Greg makes an extreme point to show that people often go off the deep end when it comes to church and Christ + hypocrites. Here’s the scoop for those who haven’t figured it out: People are hypocrites. How many times have you said something but done something completely different? I think if I’m honest with myself, I’d admit it happens about every day.

Every night I think I’m going to wake up early, every day I say “I’m going to eat healthier for lunch.” If we can lie to ourselves on a regular basis unintentionally, why is it such a shocker that people do it in public, too?

I’m sure I have a point in there somewhere… basically, I wish people would give us Christians a break — hold us accountable, yes — but don’t say “I won’t go to church because it’s full of hypocrites.” We’re trying to be full of integrity, but oftentimes our human nature comes out. That’s the real point.

Wikipedia Watchlist Feed v2

Update: I’ve been using this for awhile now, and I still have to manually check my watchlist every day because my reader only gets updates every few days. I’m not sure, but it seems to be a caching issue on the WP API and not so much the script’s fault.

Update 2: The load on my server was too much, so I removed the hosted script from my server. You can still download the source and host it yourself.

Update 3: Turns out it’s better to just subscribe to each page’s feed rather than to use a script like this.

Back before Wikipedia had an API, I created a script that scraped the HTML and generated a plain RSS feed of my watchlist. Now, it’s even easier as the new API does most of the work for you, provided you correctly authenticate with it. So, version 2 of the script is much simpler, and simply acts to authenticate a user and grab the feed as-is and hand it to the browser/aggregator/etc.

The script source is here.

Basically, the URL would look like this:

http://71m.org/watchlist.cgi?username=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD

Before you go trying it on my server, be aware that: (I have removed the script from my server. Sorry.)

  1. Your password and username are in the URL in plain-text (and thus in my server logs if you use this script directly from my server). This might scare you. I’m not an evil person, but then again, I wouldn’t believe someone else telling me that for a second. If you don’t trust me, then grab the script and stick it on your own server.
  2. I will leave my script running for you to use directly, but if the load becomes too much on my lowly server, I will disable it.

So, there’s two reasons to grab the script and run it on your own server.

Thanks to Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya for his Python script that does basically the same thing.

Snippets Feed

It occured to me that my gems of wisdom on my Snippets page likely go unnoticed by you faithful blog readers, so you might want to subscribe to my snippets feed as well so you don’t miss beauties like this (yes, I know this will seem lame to some, but I think it’s clever):

class Object
 def in?(object)
   object.include? self
 end
end


>> 1.in? 2..3
=> false
>> 1.in? 1..3
=> true





				

			



			

				

					
Lost is Finding Itself Again

					
    
						
  • February 7, 2007 – 11:52 pm
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My guess is Lost has lost many of its viewers in the last year due to a crawling storyline and endless questions without answers. I say this because, after watching tonight’s episode, the direction of the show has definitely changed. I think those writers finally figured out they don’t have blind followers — they have to get off their butts and actually move the story along. And that’s what they finally did tonight. Thank you. Now I can look forward to Wednesday nights again.



				

			



			

				

					
Music Sharing

					
				

				


Dvorak is spot on about the music industry:


 During the heyday of Napster and open free music sharing and trading, when million of people swapped songs, the CD business was booming. Once Napster was shut down, and along with it the social network of music discovery, sales began to plummet. They are still falling.



				

			



			

				

					
Useless Account

					
				

				


Useless Account


This is my reason for getting one:


You’re addicted to signing up to account-requiring websites the moment they’re  									released just so no one else takes your usual username.



				

			



			

				

					
Preacher Blog

					
				

				


Greg Pittman, the preaching minister at my church, now has a blog. I got him set up this weekend, and he’s started it off with a great post about our recent prayer week.


He also said something interesting to me that really got me thinking about how the Web has affected us the last few years:


I’m not looking to be trendy. It [blogging] just seems to be an effective way to communicate with an ever-ambiguous, mobile congregation, and in a more interactive fashion.


For Cedar Ridge, 2007 seems so far to be the year of connectedness, at least in the electronic sense (and hopefully/consequently in the community sense as well).  This year, we launched our new website, we launched a Facebook-clone site for members (I won’t bother providing a link since you can’t sign in anyway — but trust me, it’s cool), we just finished revamping and reorganizing our podcast section, and now our staff is starting to blog.


I think Greg said it perfectly… we’re not wanting to follow a fad — we’re simply hoping to make the best use of the tools we have before us. And the fact that normal people (not just geeks) are utilizing the Web for more than just school research and ebay purchases is pretty darn cool to me.


It seems all the work Jennie and I have been a part of for the past several years is finally converging and helping (albeit in a tiny way) to strengthen the church body as a whole.