zerodeviation.net

…the Ruby way. We have a ton of templates for the Web-Empowered Church Starter Package, so you can imagine the work of having to make a change to it that goes beyond simple updates. We decided to replace chc_forum with mm_forum because it’s newer and better maintained, which meant to update all those templates with new styles for the new forum. Not only that, but each added style needs to match the template, so color schemes have to be different depending on the current template.

Us programmers are very lazy, so I decided to write a script that does all that for us instead of wasting hours and hours on brainless work. It’s available on the WEC SVN server. In a nutshell, there are two file to edit: template.css, and config.yaml.

The template.css file contains the new content that will be appended to the existing styles files. It contains placeholders %1-%3 that will be dynamically filled in with the right colors for this template.

The config.yaml file contains the meat of the application. Check out the inline comments for more details, but you basically give it a regular expression to apply to the existing template styles and tell it which capturing group to use as a substitute. You can give as many regular expressions/arguments as you want, but the number has to match the number of markers in the template file.
The second part of the yaml config is a list of paths and files that tell the script which file to append and parse for the substitute styles.

It was fun writing and can be used to append pretty much anything to any file you want, so it may be helpful to you!

Tags: Personal, Ruby by Christoph
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Heh, NASA found a Death Star Galaxy that shoots its neighbor galaxy with a high energy particle jet. Cool stuff

Tags: Personal by Christoph
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Found this free album download while looking around the Cross Movement website. Never heard of him before, but it’s good stuff! I am really liking it so far, so if you like Christian Hip-Hop, give it a shot.
If you like Cross Movement, they released their newest and probably last album sometime this year, it’s called “HIStory.” It’s awesome as well!

Tags: Personal by Christoph
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Or more specifically, how come eternal punishment for seemingly trivial things is not unfair? The answer is that an offense is not only measured by the action itself, but also by who was offended. Let’s look at an example. My wife and I have two dogs. What happens if I lie to my dogs? Absolutely nothing. They won’t even know. If we had children, what if I lied to them? Not much really, they may never know either, but even if they did, consequences for me would be minimal. What happens if I lie to my wife? Uh-oh, that’s more serious and may result in me sleeping on the couch for a while. What if I lie to the government? I would probably be fined or imprisoned or in some cases maybe put to death (is treason punishable by death? I thought it was…). To keep all other variables constant, let’s say the lie involves me not telling the truth about my income. I made $100,000, but tell everyone I only made $40,000. The punishment for my offense, and the offense itself, is different depending on who I offend.
Now consider God, who we sin against or offend above anyone else. What kind of punishment do we deserve if we offend an infinitely holy, infinitely just, infinitely worthy, infinitely dignified, infinitely honorable God? You guessed it. We deserve infinite punishment. Makes perfect sense to me!

Tags: Theology by Christoph
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Agnosticism, from the greek negative “a” and “gnosis” - knowledge, means without knowledge or no knowledge and deals not so much with the existence of God, but more his attributes and character, or lack of “knowability” of them.
It asserts that we cannot know about God because the concept of God is simply too much for a finite mind.

If you noticed the problem in my last sentence, congratulations! The argument would go like this:

1. God is infinite and unlimited
2. Man is finite and limited
3. Therefore man cannot know God

However, as per the premise, we already know that God is infinite and unlimited, so we know something about God. Does agnosticism have a point? Well, maybe. Is God infinite and unlimited? Definitely. Is man finite and limited? Of course. The conclusion would be correct if we changed it slightly by adding one word: exhaustively. Man cannot know God exhaustively. Does that pose a problem for the Christian? Not really, because we can indeed know God at some level, and I go so far as to say that thanks to the Bible, we can know God sufficiently.

What, then, is sufficient knowledge of God? We can know all about God that God wants us to know about Him. We can definitely know who we are and who God is, ontologically. We can know that we are fallen and don’t hold up to God’s perfect law and standard. We can know that we cannot be reconciled to God no matter what we do. We can know that God had to step in if He ever wanted to have/restore fellowship with Him, and indeed did by sending His Son Jesus, the God-Man, to redeem us by paying the penalty for sin, which we can accept by repenting and putting our faith in Him.

That’s a lot of stuff we can know already, though none of these is complete or exhaustive knowledge. And believe me when I say, that is only the beginning of how much we can know God and know about God, by far.

Tags: Philosophy, Theology by Christoph
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