Monday, February 28, 2005

Mono via Paco at PDNUG

I wanted to add an 'o' to 'PDNUG' just so it would rhyme ('Mono via Paco at PDNUGo'), but decided that's really unnecessary. But, I still like it enough to mention it. Anyway...

I was able to see Paco's Mono presentation a couple months ago at the Fort Worth Dot NET User Group. I very much enjoyed the session, and was glad to meet Paco. I'm also looking forward to this months PDNUG meeting very much. It is, by the way, this Wednesday. If you are a .NET developer, I HIGHLY recommend you be there. If you're into cross-platform development, well, it's just a must. If you're not, come check it out anyway, I think you'll enjoy it.

So, what am I doing to get ready? Well, first of all, I'm trying to get up to speed with some of the new developments in Mono, especially Windows Forms. I'm going to be spending as much time on it as possible in the next couple days, just so I can find some hard questions :)

Anyway, if you live in the Dallas area, and you're a .NET programmer, you should attend. And if the subject isn't quite enough to get you there, also remember that they give you free pizza, drinks, have prizes, and have a recruiting agency sponsor the thing that is looking to hook people up with jobs. So...go!

Getting Started with Subversion

So, I downloaded Subversion (Svn), a version control system. I've played with CVS just a tiny bit, but use Visual SourceSafe (VSS) quite a bit at work. I've been needing a source control solution at home, but I wasn't sure which way I wanted to go. I have a developer's license for VSS, so that way wouldn't cost me any money. Then again, neither would CVS or Svn.

VSS is a good choice because I'm somewhat familiar with it. But, I think I'm going to go with Svn. Why? Well, for a few reasons.

First, it's what Mono uses. Since I'm still dabbling in Mono development, and plan to do a lot more than just that at some point, this seems like a decent idea.

Second, I've heard positive things about it lots of places. And, from what I've heard, some of the CVS developers are developing Svn as a replacement for CVS. I thought I heard that somewhere, anyway. Also, if I remember right, at least one of the bibliobloggers likes it, Tauber.

Third, it is something I can use with others, and they won't have to pay for VSS licenses. I'm just trying to be nice...

So, I started with TortoiseSvn. It's a version of Svn that integrates directly into Windows Explorer. It's pretty nice, actually. I may move to a command line client since that's probably what most people in the Mono world do. But, for a bit, this will do. If you're just getting started with source control or Svn, it's a good way to go.

If anyone has any suggestions on Svn tools, I'm all ears.

The Coding Humanist: Back In Action

Okay, so I'm back now. I've had an incredibly busy week and a half, as you can probably guess. Here are the events and a few thoughts, in summary.

1. Unfortunately, we had to go with a c-section this time. She was just too chunky. Fortunately, though, it went very well. They let me come in, though I didn't really watch. I just hung out with Kat on the other side of the sheet that blocked her view. It was actually a little funny to hear them chanting in chorus all the surgical utensils at the end. I asked and they said it was to make sure they didn't leave anything in her. I was thankful :)

2. Jonathan, our 2-year-old, responded very well to Abigail. No problems there at all. He is also very conscious when she's crying. When he hears it he says, "Abby, Abby" to let us know that she's crying. Very cute.

3. Abigail (or Abby for short, usually) is a very good sleeper and eater. I'm getting a lot more sleep this time than I did when Jonathan was born. I am, of course, very thankful for that!

4. Kathryn is doing well and recovering quickly, though she is very tired. But I guess that is to be expected.

5. I had to work a little last week, but this week starts me back on my normal schedule. At least close to normal. One member of the team is leaving, so I'm going to be taking on some new responsibilities to fill in the gap. But, it should be fine.

Well, I guess that's the last week and a half in brief. The more we return toward a state of normalcy, the better. And it is happening...slowly.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

I Love Home

Yes. I am still alive, though a little more tired than I was a week ago. We got home from the hospital two days ago, which is a huge relief. Four nights on a cot at the hospital is enough for me for quite a while.

I plan on posting pictures of Abigail this weekend. I will, of course, let all of you know when they're available. Thanks to all of you for your wishings of me well. I'm trying to catch up with the blogosphere right now, and plan on jumping right back in as soon as possible.

Friday, February 18, 2005

Abigail Marie Sowell is born

Well, at 11:09 this morning we had our second child, Abigail Marie. She weighed in at 8 lbs 7 oz and was delivered via c-section. Mother and baby are both doing very well.

Because of this, I'll be at the hospital for the next four days. So don't be surprised if you email or call me and I don't respond soon :)

Proud Father

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

New Internet Explorer

It is officially announced now that MS will come out with IE7, to appear in beta form this fall. Thanks, Richard Tallent, for pointing this out to me first. You can read a little more about it here, on the IE weblog.

Here are my thoughts.

1. I'm glad it is happening, but it is unfortunate that it had to take a competitor (Firefox, of course!) to get them to do this. They don't SAY that Firefox is the reason. But, come on. You know it is.

2. Browser wars! Expect part 2, this time. Okay, the rules of the game should be as follows. The participants should fight primarily around three things. First, who will be the best at implementing correctly the w3c standards? That's the biggest thing, by far. If they don't both adhere to the standards, we'll be back in the day when you have to support two very different ways of building a site, or you'll have to settle with the lowest common denominator. Neither is good for the web developer, or the web user. And do as little browser specific stuff. The more you do, the more people will want to use them. And the more they do, the more they'll be perpetuating a less-usable web. Yes, I know, it's a decent business decision to do browser-specific stuff. But it's a bad community decision. Second, who will be the most secure? This is obviously an important one, and MS knows that. Security has been the big critique of IE that has driven so many to FF. Third, usability and features. One of FF's hits has been tabbed browsing. What else can the two come up with that will rock?

3. I love competition. If everyone follows the rules above, or at least closely follow the rules, this will be very good for the web. Yay!

4. Right now they are only planning on shipping for XP SP2 and later. Though it would be neat if it went further back, this isn't a terribly bad idea in my mind. It is probably a smart business decision in that it might encourage people to buy upgrades. And if security is going to be one of your big pushes with this, if you run it on pre-XPSP2 machines, you run the risk of IE7 getting a more tarnished reputation. With the extra security measures in XPSP2, you probably have a little less to worry about when developing the browser. Or to say it another way, running it on XPSP2 will probably be safer than running it on anything else. So tons of Win 2000 users may complain because they're still getting spyware, when they might not if they're running XPSP2. Of course, it also doesn't bother me because that's what I'm running :)

Sunday, February 13, 2005

HttpModules and Browser Capabilities

What do these have in common? Nothing, except that they both have to do with ASP.NET.

HttpModules

So I decide to implement my own HttpModule. I'm working on my Lexel Software website (it needs a bit at the moment) and decided to create my own stat tracker code. I've learned quite a bit through this experience. And since I'm not finished, I'm sure I'll learn more.

First, creating HttpModules in ASP.NET are simple. First, create a class that implements IHttpModule and add something to your web.config file. Voila! Done. This is a good way of firing off some code anytime a request is made.

Second, I wanted to have access to my SessionState data in my module. But, apparently, at that point you can't get to that data directly. So how do you solve that issue? As it turns out, it's not too hard.

You can have your module hook into ASP.NET request handling sequence at a number of points. Some of your options are to hook it up at BeginRequest, the Page Constructor, Page.Init, Page.Load, or EndRequest. But which one should you choose? I went with EndRequest. You see, the Init() method on the page has access to the HttpApplication.Context.Items collection. You can take any data that you want to have access to and put it into that collection. Then, on the EndRequest event handling method in your module, you can get the values out and deal with them accordingly. Cool.

Anyway, HttpModules are easy to build. So if you need per-request code run, it's a decent way of doing it. You can also have all your pages descend from a base page that all the others inherit from, and that works ok. But this way is pretty slick.

HttpBrowserCapabilities

An object of this class is associated with the HttpApplication as well, and by using it you do get access to some of the capabilities of the browser surfing your site. But it's not perfect, so I'm going to have to look outside of this a little.

Anyway, it is recognizing Firefox as Netscape. That's okay though, since not many people would be using Netscape today. Second, it doesn't tell you what version of the Clr that the user is running. This isn't surprising, of course. From their perspective, they probably don't care. But it would still be nice to know.

Classical Language Standards

I really wish I could spend more time reading and responding on B-Greek. I barely even get to read it these days. But, I did notice one interesting link today.

http://www.aclclassics.org/pdf/standards.pdf

Those are the "Standards for Classical Language Learning" published by the ACL and the APA. As one who is interested in classical language and education, I found it to be an interesting read.

Friday, February 11, 2005

To Constantinople and Back Again - CSNTM Update

Alright, Greek geeks. We just finished an update of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts site, www.csntm.org. Dan Wallace, Ivan Yong, and Greg Jenks took a trip to Constantinople/Istanbul last year, and now we're starting to post images. At this point all we've posted is two images a piece of 16 of the manuscripts that they photographed. If you're interested in that sort of thing, take a look here. They also have a write-up about the trip, including news on previously unknown manuscripts. Check it out!

I hope to add an RSS feed to their site soon, but until then, pay attention to the site or this blog. When we're able to post more images from the trip, I'll let you know!

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Arab World Anti-Americanism

My brother made a post on the source of anti-Americanism in the Arab world. I thought it was quite informative. Give it a read, if you're interested in such things.

Woot!

Any of you guys heard about Woot! before? It's a pretty cool site. The site sells one product a day, starting at midnight, and one only. If they sell out early, they will occassionally start a new sale during the day. But, since I've been watching it they've only sold one thing a day. Anyway, the guys who run the site can be pretty funny at times, so you sometimes also get a little more humor in your day.

What do they sell? It usually is technology related, but you can't be much more specific than that. Most of what you'll see is stuff like printers, scanners, cameras, and stuff like that. But they also sell Robosapien, MPEG4 recorders, waterproof phones, speakers, and remote-control dinosaurs. Sometimes their prices are great. And, yes, they have an RSS feed. Rock on!

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Firefox Tweak

I heard of a Firefox tweak the other day on Adam Curry's weblog, the 1-31 show. But it is only for those on some type of broadband connection. This will, in theory, speed up how fast Firefox will render your pages:

1. Type in "about:config" in the address bar.
2. Find the entry on the screen called "network.http.pipelining". Double-click on it and change it to "true".
3. Find the entry on the screen called "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests". It was the next one in the list for me. Double click on that and change the value to "10".

Essentially, this lets the browser use more of your bandwidth to download the page. Supposedly, anyway.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Coming Spyware for Firefox

Via Slashdot, Newsforge is predicting the spyware creators are going to start targetting Firefox.

mozillaZine responds by saying "Hey morons, they've already started." That's a very loose quotation :)

But shouldn't we all see this coming? Spyware and virus producers are going to focus on is popular. It only makes sense. And now that Firefox is gaining momentum, their reputation is going to start to get tarnished as flaws are detected because more people start looking for them. I'm not bashing the browser. I use it 99% of the time. People are going to have to stop saying "Firefox is the safe browser and IE is the one full of security holes." Now, IE will probably have more. But a more reasonable attitude toward Firefox's security is a smart idea.

The same will probably hold true for Linux if they ever get around to popularity in the desktop market. But, we'll have to wait to see if that happens.

Google Maps

The Scobleizer pointed out the new Google maps. Nice interface. Checked for my address, the address of my parents, and let it generate directions from my house to theirs. Both of our addresses were about 50 yards off on the map, but that can be excused :)

The directions were pretty good as well, though it's not the way I get there. It took the route of the interstate for the whole trip, which I don't think is the most efficient way to get from Big-D to SE Texas. But, close enough.

And I like the look of the maps themselves. And they loaded pretty quickly.

Overall, I dig it.

Another Look at Community Server

So I decided to play around more with Community Server this morning. I managed to setup a blog and a forum group. It takes a bit to get used to the Admin pages and such, but I figured it out after a few minutes.

One thing I really thought was slick was how the blog posts were stored. If you look at the url, it sure looks like they've got a physical file where they store the stuff. Nope. That's all for show. It's in the db. Groovy.

Overall, still pleased. And still looking forward to when they release the code...

Monday, February 07, 2005

Lexel Shared Source and Xml Serialization

Been working on some code that I'm going to be sharing with the world. Right now it has two pieces. The first is some code to go fetch data from ZHubert's xml. That's almost done. I'm also adding in some classes for creating and RSS feed, which I'll be using for the NET GEMS project. That actually creates a valid rss xml file now, though not the whole 2.0 specification. Not that it's a big spec. Should take only a few hours to finish.

Anyway...so instead of building the Xml manually using an XmlTextWriter or the XmlDocument class, I'm doing the whole thing through the Xml Serialization functionality of the .NET framework. I found in this article how to serialize an array of objects as a flat series of xml items, but it doesn't say how to do the same with an ArrayList, which is what I would like to do. To do it with an array all you have to do is this:

[XmlElement]
public RSSItem[] ItemArray;

But that won't work for an ArrayList, because the serializer needs to know the type of the object that is in the ArrayList to serialize it. So you may be thinking, "just do this":

[XmlElement]
[XmlElement(typeof(RSSItem))]
public ArrayList Items;

Nope. The element name for the items ends up being the class name, which is RSSItem. But how about this?

[XmlElement("item")]
[XmlElement(typeof(RSSItem))]
public ArrayList Items;

Nope. Same result. I also have the RSSItem class declaration with a "[XmlRoot("item")]", but that doesn't seem to help.

As is, I've got a work around to deal with this but it feels like too much of a hack. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm open. I'm sure I'm missing something pretty obvious here.


[Update 2/7/2005, 8:00]
Figured it out. I just had to declare my ArrayList like this:

[XmlElement(typeof(RSSItem), ElementName="item")]
public ArrayList Items;

Voila! I can't think of why the other options didn't work. But, oh well.

Community Server and Bug Tracking

I downloaded Community Server RC2 this weekend and installed it. Very cool, though I'm looking forward to seeing the code, which they're not releasing till they release v1. And I totally dig their web install feature. It makes setting up the server extremely easy. I really want to redo the Christonomy site using it, and will probably do so as soon as they release version 1. The functionality of that site needs some work, and I need to spend a lot more time on it anyway, but I haven't had time at all to write lately, at least not outside of this blog.

I've been needing a bug tracking solution for my NET GEMS project (which I don't have enough time to focus on!), and I decided to take the advice of my friend and ex-coworker Xander Sherry and download the Issue Tracker Starter Kit. Installed it last night and it seems to work okay, though I noticed one glitch in the setup. If you try to back up during it, you'll find a lot of bits on the screen have disappeared. Nothing major though, and it is in beta. Anyway, I think it will work great. Now, Xander is apparently refactoring the thing a great deal. Are you willing to share your source?

Some Cool New (to Me) Biblioblogs

Qumranica.com
He hasn't started posting yet, but I expect a lot out of Jim Davila's new blog.

PastoralEpistles.com
Second blogs are apparently all the rage these days. Rico has started a second blog. And yes, please provice an RSS feed, Rick.

Midrash Le-Justin
I'm sorry, but I don't remember who originally pointed this out, but someone in the biblioblogosphere linked to this guy somewhere along the way. Looks like we'll have some interesting material here.

Super Bowl Disappointing

I watched the Super Bowl last night at my friend Chris' house and enjoyed the company. I was, however, very disappointed with the commercials. This is a problem, because some years the commercials can be absolutely hilarious. Have companies stopped trying to be funny? There were some good moments, though. Here are my top commercials:

1. Ameriquest Mortgage: They had a few different commercials, but the best was the one about not jumping to conclusions that involved a man, spaghetti sauce, cat, knife, and significant other. That cracked me up.
2. The CareerBuilder commercials about working with monkeys were also pretty good, especially the last. I guess I enjoyed it so much because it sometimes reminds me of my job :)
3. Not funny, but I enjoyed the new trailer for "Batman Begins." That's going to be good.

Saturday, February 05, 2005

One Motivation For Literalist Exegesis

There has recently been a little discussion of a Time article, which was discussed by Edward Cook, Michael Pahl, and Cook once more. Interesting discussion. One of the characteristics that Cook originally pointed out was evangelical was literalist exegesis, though Pahl corrected and Cook revised his description.

And they're right. "Literalist" interpretation as Cook defines it isn't characteristic of evangelicalism. But it is rather common and is a hallmark of the more classical dispensational thinkers. But few would debate this, I think.

While I was at DTS I had a great deal of interaction with those that would and should probably be lumped into the category of the "literalists." The DTS faculty is somewhat split as far as dispensationalism is concerned. You've got the old school, more classical dispensational professors and students who could be included. But you also have the more progressive professors and students who, though they would still hang on to some of the same ideas, actually thought much differently. The more progressive types have realized that the "literal" interpretation method at least needs to supported by other observations, though many would really rather not be seen as using that method at all.

But have you ever wondered what the motivation was for the more literalist camp of thinkers? I'm sure a huge one is historical precedent, as their teachers passed on to them their assumptions. But that is to be expected. Another one that might not be as expected is that literalist exegesis became for them a matter of personal intellectual surety.

I can't tell you how many times I heard this fallacy, but I heard it from more classically leaning professors and students frequently. If you would talk to one of them about, say, the church as the fulfillment of OT Israel or understanding Revelation preteristically you'd not uncommonly hear something like the following: "If you don't interpret the Scriptures literally, how could you ever know if what you believe is true?" The idea here is that to interpret things "allegorically" or "spiritually" and not "literally" is to remove any chance of coming to any sure understanding of the text. After all, if two people interpret a text allegorically, and they differ, who is correct? Thus they argue for that type of interpretation based on the perceived inability of being able to come to true knowledge on a matter.

So let's analyze this for a bit. First of all, as an argument against the right or wrong of not interpreting things literally, we see that this line of thinking isn't anything more than a logical fallacy. The assumption here is that an hermeneutic which yields more consistent, measurable results is necessarily more correct. But that's hogwash. It isn't hard to come up with a very consistent, measurable hermeneutic that doesn't lead you anywhere. I could, for example, get the ASCII numerical values of all the letters in the English alphabet, use those numbers to calculate the numerical value of every word in the NT, and could then build a very consistent interepretive scheme by saying words of similar numerical value refer to the same theological entity in God's plan for the world. I could do something like that and make interpretive links between lots of words and verses, but any correspondence between that and reality would simply be accidental. "Clear", or "unambiguous" does not equal true, just as "unclear" and "ambiguous" do not equal false.

So logically it is just a silly argument. But it may not always their logic that is driving them on this point. I think it may be an unconcious desire for a more sure interpretation of existence. After all, who wouldn't want to remove some ambiguity from life? But that's not an argument against going a particular interpretive direction; it's just a sign that you've been convinced by someone that ambiguity is something you can get away from.

Sorry. Don't mean to break this to you. But you can't. We don't know everything about our world today. And you know what? We know even less when it comes to documents that are 2000+ years old. And that's the direction my friends and I had to go at times in conversations. Though we were also quick to point out that a more "literalist" interpretation isn't what the early church really practiced anyway. I always thought it was funny when professors tried to explain Paul's exegesis in terms of "literal" interpretation.

But, like it has been said, this is not a problem with all evangelicalism. But it is a problem with a decent portion of it. But, if the trends tell you anything, this will become less and lesson common in evangelical academia, and (hopefull) less common over time among the laity.

Instant Messenger

Jim West recently blogged about putting your instant messenger name on your blog. Well, good idea.

The only instant messenger program that I consistently use is Microsoft's Messenger. My name is mallioch@msn.com.

Finding Some Good Podcasts...

I have been enjoying listening to podcasts the last few days, which I've noted recently. Most of my work-day/night generally involves coding, so I don't find the time to read that I would like. Podcasts actually help with this quite a bit. Along with techie podcasts, I've also been listening to some N.T. Wright lectures that are quite good. If you're a veteran Wright reader, especially if you've read his Jesus and the Victory of God, you'll probably not get a whole lot of new information out of them. The N.T. Wright page has links to these lectures. I've listened to the first three mentioned ("Jesus and the Kingdom", "Jesus and God", and "Jesus and the Cross") which are in a series. If you haven't ever had a Wright experience, I recommend them. Start with "Jesus and the Kingdom." And I'm always looking for more interesting audio by biblical scholars. If you know any, please let me know.

I've also found a nice podcasting series on wine. If you're interested, check out Grape Radio.

I Am Spider-Man

I am finally able to come close to fulfilling a childhood dream. Unfortunately, it comes from teaching my son, Jonathan, something which is untrue. But, it's worth it, really. First, I taught my son who Spider-Man was. He can now identify him when he looks at my dvds, his backpack, or my pajamas. The next step was to teach him that I was, in fact, Spider-Man. I am very pleased that this whole thing has worked out.

Yes, yes. I know. You're jealous. But I'm sorry, there can only be one Spider-Man.

Friday, February 04, 2005

Book Meme

I don't even know what a "Meme" is, though I'll guess I'll look it up in a minute. Joshua Tallent is following some "Book Meme", and I thought I would do the same. Looks like fun. Here are the instructions:

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Open the book to page 123.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
  5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

And here's what I got:

"If v is definitely assigned at the end of expr, then it is definitely assigned on the control flow transfer to then-stmt and to either else-stmt or to the end point of stmt if there is no else clause."

From The C# Programming Language by Hejlsberg, Wiltamuth, and Golde. Who in their right minds wouldn't have this by them all day long?


February, PDNUG and Community Server

Last night I had the pleasure of attending another stellar meeting of the Plano .NET Users Group. We had Rob Howard come out and explain one of his company's (Telligent Systems) projects, Community Server.

What is Community Server? Essentially, it is .TEXT (the blogging engine created by Scott Watermasysk), nGallery (a photosharing application created by Jason Alexander), and ASP.NET forums (a forums package done partly by Rob, I believe) all rolled into one. Telligent now has all the creators of these three open source projects now working for them, so they've combined the projects and improved them a great deal.

How was the presentation? Excellent. We didn't take a break at all the whole presentation (from around 6:30 to after 8:00, I think). And I didn't even notice till the very end. Good stuff.

What do I think of Community Server? Well, I'm impressed. I'm thinking of using it to do a rewrite of a couple of my sites. And it is an open source project, so one can take it and modify it if needed. It also has a nice, modularized, plug-in architecure, so extending it shouldn't be too tough. I'd like to create a MySql data provider for it for my own hosting, so I'll probably get firsthand experience with that. Overall I was very impressed with the project. They'll be releasing the code whenever version 1 comes out, and I'm definitely looking forward to that. Rob said he was going to release RC2 today, so that hopefully won't be long.

Anyway, if you need forums and/or blog and/or photo-sharing, check it out.

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Why I Don't Blog on Politics Much

Even though I find politics fairly interesting, I don't generally blog about it. And here's why. There are few subjects in a conversation that will almost immediately crush any hopes of good discussion more quickly than talks of politics. People arguing over their favorite flavor of icecream, no big deal. If you get into an argument with someone on whether white or purple grape juice is better, you're likely to be able to have a meaningful conversation after that. However, that is often not the case with politics. Especially these days. There are a ton of people who think Bush is the Antichrist, Hitler, etc. If you say you like Bush, it is not uncommon for such folk to think you're a complete idiot. And the reverse is often the case as well. If you read/watch any political discussions, you find stupid attacks on people all the time. It's not about logical discouse, usually. It's about saying the other guy is evil/stupid/untrustworthy...

And, of course, I have an example. Some anonymous person posted a sarcastic and mildly insulting remark on my state of the union post.

>Who was it who once said "This is just pitiful" (a reference to a post I made)?
>Oh yeah. I agree with the invocation "God bless America," it's just that I
>don't see it as having happened in the current leadership. By a long shot.

Was that really necessary? Of course not. He could have just as easily had said "I don't like Bush. And I don't think a proper relationship with God drives his decisions." That would have been fine. But modern political discussion these days tends to turn into ad hominem attack and useless whining. I don't mind when people disagree with Bush, or me. I really do not. Actually, I look for it. I've come to realize that I will not grow intellectually unless people critique me. And sarcasm as a tool for humor or effective discouse is great. But being sarcastic and implying "you apparenly have little discernment" is just annoying.

That is the climate, it seems. That's why I won't really get into significant political discussion on my blog. I think it will hamper other discussion which isn't so explosive and is a lot more fun.

Now to bed. I'm tired.

Podcasting

I'm continuing on my series on blogs, well, sort of. I'm sure you know what a blog is now. To know what a podcast is, just think blog-put-to-audio and you basically have it.

The name came from the combination of two different words, broadcasting and the iPod. To broadcast in such a way that someone can download it and put it on their iPod is, well, podcasting. The concept is really broader than just an audio blog. So, if you hear the term, now you know. You'll find a nice historical discussion at Wikipedia.

If you broaden podcasting to include not just blogs, I've found some good tech resources. First is DotNetRocks. Lots of interesting discussions on issues related to .NET programming. Often entertaining.

Second is ITConversations. Some pretty neat stuff mixed in with some stuff I don't find quite as interesting. They are constantly updating with new material, though, so that's good.

The only audio blog I've listened to is Adam Curry (note: some will find some of his content objectionable). Interesting guy. An ex DJ at MTV.

Now me, I listen to podcasts the authentic way...on the iPod. But, really, just listening at your computer at home or work is good too.


State of the Union Address

Unfortunately, I missed the first thiry minutes of the address. I came in as he talked about Social Security reform. Anyway, I don't get into politics much, and I won't much in this post. All I want to say is, well, good speech. I am very appreciative of what Bush and his staff have done and continue to do. I can't wait to see what our leadership has for us in the future. God bless America.

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

iTrip

I have now further immersed myself into the iPod culture. I went to the Apple store near work and picked up the iTrip at lunch today. If you're not familiar with it, the iTrip is an FM transmitter made to attack to your iPod mini (or regular iPod). This allows you to broadcast to an FM frequency and listen to your iPod in your vehicle through the stereo. On the way home, my carpooling buddy (Mike) and I listed to a speech by Mark Cuban at the Web 2.0 conference and a podcast by Adam Curry (interesting fellow, though I only listened to a very short podcast). Overall the experience was positive. There was a little interference, but that was around even with the iPod was paused, so I'm not sure it had anything to do with it or not. But, regardless, I'm very pleased that I have it. Now we won't be slaves to the radio for interesting content :)

And speaking of interesting content, I'm looking for recommendations for audio broadcasts that I can listen to on my iPod. Through the NT Wright page I got some of this lectures and listened to one today, though I'm looking for more stuff by him and by others. Any recommendations would be helpful, and I'll be sure to post them when I've collected some for myself.

Joining the iPod Club

Well, yesterday I officially joined the iPod club. I got a refurbished silver iPod mini from a local CompUsa at a discount. So far I love it. Easy to navigate. Management of my mp3's on it isn't too bad either.

So what do I have filling up that 4 GB of space? A little over half is music (mostly rock). I also downloaded Ephesians and Mark in Greek from GreekLatinAudio.com, as well as some podcasts/online spoken audio stuff from ITConversations and DotNetRocks. And as soon as I get some more Khmer audio resources, I'll add that too.

I would appreciate any recommendations in terms of podcasting. I'm pretty sure I'll be listening to a lot of those now.

So, after less than 24 hours of usage, I must say I already love my iPod.