Loss At War

I've mentioned an acquiantance of mine, Paco, on the blog a few times. I just learned that he lost his son in Iraq.

Paco, I am very sorry for your loss. I can't imagine there is anything harder for a parent to go through. My prayers are with you.

It Has Been A Long Time...And A Note on Zwingli

Wow, have I been busy. Workload and stress has increased at RealPage. And yes, family takes up time. And yes, I've got other things to do you know! I haven't even really been keeping up with the blogosphere. So, I'm trying to resurrect my blogging life again. It has been 11 days!

Of course, there is so much to comment on. I'll begin with only one thing, though, from Jim West. This is probably because you appear at the top of my RSS feed list alphabetically. I noticed with great interest the new Zwingli store that Jim West apparently created.

I have actually wondered for some time what Jim's fascination with Zwingli was. Care to explain how this came about? My first "I love Zwingli" moment came when I read his "On Providence". For a number of years I have held to a view of salvation, election, and providence that fit much more closely with the Reformed view than more Arminian-ish view I grew up believing. I read modern authors, as well as both Luther (and his oppenent, Erasmus) and Calvin (I would have read his opponent, Pighius, if I could have found an English translation of his work) on the subject before coming to Zwingli, but quickly found Zwingli to be the best of them all in my opinion. Of course, I'm apparently not as huge a fan of Zwingli as Jim is, but I like him a lot :)

So, when I can, I'm going to have to get me a coffee mug or shirt.

Running Mono Windows Forms in Visual Studio

Okay, though most of you won't think it is cool, I do. I got Mono's Windows Forms code from Subversion and have started to play around with it. What I didn't know was that some of the code was already setup to run in Visual Studio. One of the windows forms developers (kangaroo on IRC) was nice enough to point this out.

According to kanga, there is a script that will update the project files for running in VS. Instead, I just opened the solution and added the files that weren't already in the project. Anyway, it seems to work. Hopefully not running the script won't cause me problems later...

Anyway, this is really cool. This will allow me to use my Windows Forms stuff on Mac. Cross-platform development, baby. And, speaking of, I have now successfully run one of my winform programs on my Mac. There is still a lot of work to do to get all the winform stuff ready for primetime, but it is already starting to be functional. Woohoo!

Beginner Biblical Hebrew Textbooks

Ed has a request out for recommendations of beginner biblical Hebrew books.

I learned a little Hebrew at DTS using Seow's A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew. Even though it is packed full of useful information, it is difficult to learn from. I do not recommend it. And, it is very deductive in its approach, so it isn't what you are looking for.

Just after I took first year Hebrew they switched to Pratico and Van Pelt's grammar. That one seems better, but I have not had a chance to spend much time in it as of yet.

My two cents.

OT Pseudepigrapha Index

Jim west points out an index to the Charlesworth's OT Pseudepigrapha done by Kevin Edgecomb.

Thanks for the link, Jim. And you, Kevin, are officially my favorite person of the day for doing this.

Anybody know of a good concordance to the same?

Imputation and the Westminster Divines

A few years ago a couple friends of mine and I started discussing (it was during our DTS years) the Protestant doctrine of imputation, specifically, whether or not it was in fact true. We eventually came to the conclusion that it was, in fact, not true. The fellow who was really asking the question first (Ragan) has posted his thoughts on why on our Christonomy website.

Of course, this can cause quite a problem. Lots of people out there that we actually respect would label us as heretics over this. The doctrine has been pretty important in Protestant history, so coming out and saying that we didn't believe in imputation was actually a pretty big deal for us.

So, I was quite surprised when Ragan emailed me this morning with some information that, frankly, just made me feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside. As it turns out, some of the authors of one of the most important confessions in Protestant history, the Westminster Confession, AGREE with us (here is one link that talks about it). Apparently Twisse, Vines, Gataker, and Lightfoot all disagreed with putting language in the confession that connected the active obedience of Christ to justification. And not only that, but the rest of the Divines gave in and made the statement ambiguous enough to allow for the possibility of disagreement on the issue. As it states now, "imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ" was apparently stated that way so one could define obedience as either just the passive obedience of Christ (Twisse, Vines, Gataker, and Lightfoot), or a combo of both passive and active (classical understanding of imputation).

Now, ultimately, my test for orthodoxy isn't the ideas of the Westminster Divines anyway. We don't even use that confession at my church; we use the First London Confession of Faith (link to pdf). But it is helpful anyway. Next time someone says something like "Protestants have always believed this and to not believe such says that you're not a Christian", I can say "No, that's not true. Not only did some of the Divines (some of the most respected theologians in Protestant history) disagree, the other Divines didn't think it was heresy."

That made me happy.

Mono Takes PDNUG By Storm!

Last night we had a Mono presentation at our monthly Plano Dot Net User Group meeting. It was greatness!

Not only did Paco come and do the presentation, which we expected, but we also three others. Eric Dasque, the product manager for Mono at Novell flew in for the meeting. He talked quite a bit during the presentation and was very informed (as you would expect) and approachable. Got to talk to him some before the meeting. We also had what I think are two local mono contributors, Joseph Hill and Zac Bowling. They both made their contributions to the presentation as well. Excellent job on the presentation, guys.

And it was an excellent meeting. It was different than the FWDNUG in that they didn't spend much time on overview. They spent enough time to explain the basics of Mono then started creating Windows Forms and GTK# apps and ran them under Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. Major cool! Of course, I knew that was the point and I knew they could do that anyway. But it was still cool. They gave us Windows Forms guys a look at GTK# and Gecko# as well, which was nice.

Thanks to all the presenters, and to the officers of PDNUG for making this happen. Very much enjoyed the whole thing. It went great, and I'm looking forward to more Mono. And when are we going to have a local Mono user's group? Hopefully soon...

Ran Windows Forms Under Mono

Officially, for the first time, I just a winform application using Mono instead of the Microsoft's .NET engine. Woohoo! The program is a little bit of code I wrote a few months ago that will one day be a sentence diagramming tool. In terms of Windows Forms classes, I've got a menu, open and save dialogs, buttons, and a panel that I do a lot of System.Drawing stuff in for the diagramming. And I realize that MWF is still in heavy development, so don't let the following make you think that I don't like what they're doing. I do! I just know it isn't complete. Thoughts:

1. First off, this is very exciting to me. Can't wait to run it on my Mac to see how it looks there!
2. All the System.Drawing code worked flawlessly under Mono.
3. The buttons worked fine.
4. The panel had sizing issues. It was implemented as a user control, so that may have something to do with it. But, the issue was that the panel's size exceeded the size of the form to the right and to the bottom.
5. The open and save file dialogs are not implemented yet. One popped up a message saying "This hasn't been implemented yet." The other just said the ubiquitous "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error, though the command line was issued a statement about not being able to load the class.
6. The calls to the dialogs were in my menu. For some reason, when the exceptions were thrown the menu items didn't finish their call and close. They stayed open. I thought that was odd.

So, that was my first experience. Very pleased for a first go at this.

I'm also trying to get set up to build Mono from Subversion so I can get the latest and greatest, and maybe even contribute. That would be mucho fun. But, I'm still working on that. Have to do everything through Cygwin. That's stuff I'm not used to, but it will come to me eventually, I'm sure :)

Secret Life of Acadamia

Found this article about the secret life of profs interesting. Via Pahl.