Vision

Firefox is trying to create a world record of the most software downloads in 24hrs with their release of Firefox 3. I’ve been using Firefox almost exclusively (except for testing sites I design, since 2005). Join the crowd by clicking the graphic.

I discovered the PicLens Firefox Plugin today and was impressed with its abilities to pull photos from a Picasa

Web Album or Flickr collection and on the fly create a fully 3D photo browser.

From the website:

PicLens provides an immersive full-screen experience for viewing photos on the supported sites listed below and on sites that support Media RSS.

Sites that support the PicLens Firefox Plugin

Apparently there is a plugin that will enable its use with Wordpress as well, but it requires PHP 5 which I don’t have on my hosting platform right now. I may give it a spin at a later date.

I upgraded the Wordpress installation on this blog to version 2.5 today.  There are more changes in this update than in any previous one that I’ve encountered.  My favorite is the media browser that allows you to view all your uploaded audio/images/video in a very elegant way.  Of course the entire admin section has been re-designed.  It is much cleaner and loads faster, though it took me a few minutes to find some of the common features, since I didn’t know where to look.

Overall very impressed.  For its simple elegance, Wordpress remains my favorite Content Management System to work with.

I’ve been using some new Bible study software called Bible Desktop. It is written in Java, which for you non-techies simply means it can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux with a few minor differences in the way it works on each. For Bibles, dictionaries, commentaries, glossaries, etc., it uses modules from the Sword project, which means you have a whole library of books to choose from and which download and install easily from within the interface.

Some of the features I really like:

1. The user interface consists of one pane with fluidly resizeable  internal panes that contain the Bible on the left with a right sidebar containing a list of study helps that you’ve downloaded, an index of whatever resource you’ve selected, and of course the text of that resource.
2. The search feature, once the resource has been indexed is lightning fast.
3. In the English KJV version of the Bible, there are multiple “layers” you can turn on and off, such as linked Strong’s numbers, so while you are studying, you can just click on the number beside a word and the full text from Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance shows up in the sidebar. I was never one to, out of curiosity, go look up a word in that behemoth of a book in our family library. This allows me to do just that in a fraction of a second. I have been amazed at the different meanings behind identical English words that in Greek or Hebrew have very different meanings. In English I have often had to stare at the text numbly for a second, scratching my head, and finally figuring out the meaning, by looking at the context around that particular difficult word. Needless to say, I love this feature!
4. There are many other features that are great too such as changing the font and size of the text, determining whether you want to line break on verses or paragraphs, tabbed view of open Bibles, a daily reading schedule and more.
5. The best one is the fact that this resource is free!

And you’ve gotta love the logo:

Hey just thought I’d mention the new sidebar widget that features the books I am currently reading or have recently read. Web 2.0 is so much fun. (Did I mention I hate coding? I like copy and paste though which is all I have to do to benefit from a lot of Web 2.0 technology)

For those of you who do web design as part or all of your gainful employment, here’s a survey you can take.

 

In school I absolutely loved mathematics… until algebra came on the radar.  All of a sudden, there was no absolute answer and no absolute way to come to that variable answer.  It took me by complete surprise and I don’t think I ever recovered.  Mathematics still fascinates me (yes even Algebra, Calculus, Geometry and the more advanced forms the science takes), however my interest changed and today I find myself in the computer and information technology sector focusing on the human/psychological, social and user interface aspects, not developing the latest mathematics-laden algorithms.  With the exception of markup languages like HTML and XML, I couldn’t code if my life depended on it.  Mental block or something.  I’ll leave that area to others.  I can sure recognize good programming in the end product though :-)  Apple Computer, the Mozilla Foundation and Wordpress come to mind.  Microsoft lost it long ago, though I love their new Office 2007 user interface.

Sorry, this isn’t supposed to be a software/tech rant.  I was just thinking about how our lives are like algebra and software.   So full of variables.  Variety is the spice of life as the old adage says.  Yet with all the variety and complications of our culture, most of us want a foundation, a constant, a coordinate in the x,y,z 3-dimensional grid of time and space.  As Christians we find that constant in God.  He was, is, and will be.  When we realize how all encompassing and awesome He is, and what His Son has done for us, we repent of our own attempts to create a viable life for ourselves here on earth and give everything to Him to manage.  In turn, He shows us how to live and gives us this planet to “have dominion over”, and provides other human-beings to build relationships with and to lead to Him.  We have such a short moment to influence the world, after which we move on to another world where the constants and variables of existence are so different from our current experience that we can’t fully comprehend it until we are immersed in its reality.  “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

What other understanding of the universe is as complete as that of a 21st century Christian?  We have so much to be thankful for and to believe in.  Let’s not keep it to ourselves, but share it with others. 

Twenty years ago, the average American would sit down to a cup of coffee in the morning and read their favorite newspaper such as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times or perhaps a local newspaper.  If you wanted to find out how your out of state relatives were doing, you’d sit down and write them a personal letter.  If you wanted to keep up on your favorite organization such as various Christian missions or other charitable groups, you’d subscribe to their ink on paper newsletter.

Today, all of this is changing, thanks to blogging, and the entire, difficult-to-define set of technologies dubbed “Web 2.0″.  Now you can visit the various blogs being published by the Wall Street Journal, your local paper, your distant relatives, and the various organizations that pique your interest.  But, the time required to “serf” the web (mis-spelling intentional) to all those individual websites is prohibitive.

Enter Google Reader, a web-based blog and RSS feed reader.  If you have a gmail account, you just sign in and add the rss feeds from all your favorite blogs and news sources such as http://joshchamp.wordpress.com/feed  You can even add it to your personalized homepage along with your email at www.google.com/ig.  This allows you to quickly glance at your newest emails and all the updates to your favorite blogs on one page.  I use it personally and have found it very intuitive and easy to use.

Of course, if you don’t use Gmail, there are other feed readers, also known as feed aggregators, that do the same thing:

• Blog Lines
• News Gator
• Rocket RSS

So how do you read the news?  Feel free to comment.

Well, who could imagine it to be this easy? I was able to set up a Word Press account, import all my Blogger posts from the last year and write this little review in under a half hour! To all you friends, neighbors and country men out there in the blogosphere who are using other blogging tools, you don't know what you're missing. Try it out. You can always go back if you don't like it.   I'm still discovering features that I wouldn't have dreamed of on Blogger, but that just make sense once you use 'em.

Well, hopefully this will prove incentive enough to keep me posting on a more regular basis

I am amazed every time I need some detailed information on a given topic at the thorough in-depth articles on Wikipedia. To think that an entirely volunteer unaffiliated group of people from around the world can produce a research tool of such magnitude in a few short years! If you haven't added it to your favorites yet, you are definitely missing out. I haven't cracked open a paper based encyclopedia in the last two years and probably won't need to again (unless I'm disconnected from the internet). Of course, as with any source of uncensored information, you have to use caution. It is definitely written in a humanistic world view, though every precaution is taken by contributors to remain "unbiased". (IMHO there is no such thing as unbiased) Anyway, check it out when you're working on your next research project. I've even contributed to some of the articles myself.