wonkablog

My church’s general conference (a huge weekend of meetings where all our church leaders are gathered and speak to the entire worldwide congregation) was this weekend, and it was pretty good.  I started off really strong, looking forward to it a lot, but lost some steam as I usually do — it’s hard for me to sit through long meetings.  I guess two hours isn’t that long, but hey,  I find it hard to sit through 7 minute cartoons.

Two (of the five) sessions were really memorable for me.  The first one, when President Monson got up and spoke, he mentioned that there were going to be five new temples built.  One of them was in Cordoba, in Argentina.  I was so excited when I heard that.  I served my mission in Argentina (99-01), in Patagonia (Neuquen mission), and while Cordoba isn’t that close to us, it’s really awesome to learn that the country is going to get it’s second temple, after the one in Buenos Aires.  I’d love to fly down there for the dedication.

It got me thinking about my mission, though, and the people I worked with, and how the Lord really looks after even the least of us.  There is so much poverty and sadness in the areas I served, but the saints try hard to live the gospel.

I imagine the temple is going to be one of the smaller ones, and it reminded me of this small city in my first area.  My first city was Esquel in the province of Chubut.  Near us, there was a really tiny town called Trevelin which couldn’t have had more than a couple thousand people.  I remember walking down this long stretch of barren road, where buildings were dotted across the landscape, sometimes half a mile apart or so, and out in the middle of nowhere, was a little LDS chapel.  The Church only had a small branch in Trevelin, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smaller, prouder little building that they had.  Generally speaking, the Church doesn’t build a building unless the membership is either strong or large, and they are paying their tithes, so it really stood as a monument in mind to the faith of these very few members in that little town.  I really wish I had a picture of it, I remember it so vividly.

I do have a picture of us going to the falls there once, which the city was actually famous for.  I don’t have a scanner at home, so it’ll have to wait for now.  I do have a picture of me in my first area, though.  This was actually taken the day I was transferring from Esquel to an even smaller town, 25 de Mayo in La Pampa.

Notice the heavy coat.  It was freaking cold, there.  I remember wearing about five layers of clothes and still feeling like my bones were turned to ice.

Anyway, the rest of conference was good.  I’ve caught about half of every session so far, and I’ll catch up watching the rest during the week.  I did actually make it to the General Priesthood session on Saturday night, which was really good.  In fact, this is the first time in like four years that I actually made it to a church to watch the thing, since something always seems to happen every year, like I’ll get sick, or fall asleep or whatever.  I went with my friend Scott though, and it was great.

There was this one guy who got up, I can’t remember his name, that delivered this really powerful direct talk.  It was just awesome.  He talked about how the way to cast out Satan in our lives is the same things that worked to cast him out of Heaven in the premortal life.  Ah, the memory is fading, and the talks aren’t online yet or I’d quote him directly.  I remember there were three things, and one of them was the bearing of testimony.  Ah, I’m blanking.  Ah well, the archives will eventually be here.

Continuing in the vein of finishing up long started projects instead of jumping into new ones, I’ve cleaned up the website for the LDS Scriptures exports site.

The design itself hasn’t changed, I just reorganized everything, and it seems much simpler to navigate now.

I should hopefully have that new release ready real soon now.  The problem I run into is that I’m so particular about details, that it never gets done.  It is, of course, much more important to get it out there, even with all my human flaws, then to keep it all to myself, but I just can’t stand doing version bumps.  I like to have things done the first time.

Anyway, I’m glad this is finally cleaned up.  I like the layout much better.

Just another update on what I’ve been poking at lately.

I’ve mostly been cleaning up really small stuff, small bugfixes that have been annoying me for a while.

GPNL / Packages

For the packages website, I finally fixed it so that you can search by just package name again. It’s still messed up where it searches way too much stuff by default, but that’ll be fixed soon. It was originally searching by atom and description, so stuff like package$ would break.

I did, however, put the basic search I want to add to the packages website into GPNL: search by atom, package, category, description or all. I need to add changelog to that list. It’s not much, I know, but it’s a start on the long road to getting an advanced search going. I also cleaned up the front page a bit, and added a link to the nightly database dumps.

I also cleaned up the bash script to import the data. It actually has the beginnings of some error checking now, so you shouldn’t be seeing blank pages anymore. And the database is vacuumed correctly, and on a regularly basis, so things should be slightly snappier. I’m also importing the entire portage tree 3x daily now instead of twice. The import script is actually a nice cleanup for me, because if something breaks, I can run parts of it partially, instead of having to manually fix it. It’s much nicer.

My next big thing is getting RDEPEND searchable.  In the database, it’s combined with the DEPEND variable, so I have to separate the two out.  Once that’s done, we can finally dynamically query the tree to see where ebuilds need to be fixed for binary packages.

MPlayer / Transcode

Looking better, closed like eight bugs the other day for mplayer. Finally fixed some asinine bugs of mine for transcode, have one more to go.

Took out the masked libdvdnav because it will conflict and break libdvdread. I already wrote about how I put it in my overlay so if someone wants to use it, they can.

Sword ebuilds

I finally got pretty much all the main ones in the tree that I wanted to get in. There’s still two LDS ones that I have to make myself. Shouldn’t be too hard. I hope. In all, there are 150 sword ebuilds in the tree. Freak. That reminds me of something else I fixed on the packages website: it lists the number of results. That’s something else that’s been annoying me for a while.

I still need to remove the old sword-modules ebuild and add a new virtual-type one that will pull in all of the ones based on which language they are written in. Not hard to do, just slightly tedious. Should be done soon.

lds-scriptures 3.0

Believe it or not, I’m actually planning on getting this finished this week. The actual data has been finished for a very, very long time… it’s writing the documentation that I am extremely particular about because I plan on this being the final release.

That’s about it for now, that I can remember.

I got a poke yesterday on my original random book of mormon chapter post about creating some feeds so that people can pull them themselves. I’ve been meaning to do that for a long time, but always put it off because I’ve never written any dynamic RSS or Atom feeds before. I finally sat down and and figured it out this morning. It took me about an hour and a half to do, and I don’t think my XML is perfectly formed, but at least it works. I’ll clean it up when I have more time.

Here’s the new feeds right here. I have one for every volume of scriptures, from the Old Testament to the Pearl of Great Price, it’s all there. I think it’d be fun to add some for the Gospels and Psalms.

 http://scriptures.nephi.org/feeds.php

Right now the feed will update every time you check it, though I’ll probably come back later and change it to only update every 5 minutes or every hour or something.

To be honest, I’m not real proud of the quality of this thing right now, and I’d like to do it a lot better since I think it has some potential (like anonymous user preferences, or something), but the fact is I’ve been putting it off for way too long and I wanted to get something out the door. Aside from that, it helps me to read the scriptures more often by adding a bit of novelty to the mix.

Some other things I want to do for the feed is to have a link to the MP3 that is offered by the LDS Church on their scriptures website. Each entry feed will already link directly to the chapter page, but the naming scheme for the MP3s is slightly different, so I’ll have to do a bit of poking around before I can throw that together.

Another idea I’ve been toying with for a long time has been a simple “chapter a day” RSS feed, but with a few options for users. For instance, it’d be trivial to add features like number of chapters or verses per day, the update interval, and where to start reading.

Anyway, there’s a lot of really cool potential things to do, and I’m open to suggestions if anyone has ideas. With the database nicely normalized (and still lacking a formal release, sheesh I’m behind) it makes getting the data really simple and easy to work with.

It’s been a long time on my plate, and I’ve finally gotten around to it again, in my recent desire to finish up projects I’ve started a long time ago. This time, the LDS Scriptures exports are almost complete. I’m already done with the database exports, and I’m posting them online so I can hopefully get some feedback if there are any errors. The packaging isn’t complete, as I’ve only got Sqlite 2, 3, MySQL and PostgreSQL done. Once I know the schema is good to go, I’ll get to all the other formats (Access, CSV, XML, etc.).

The big change in this release is that the database is normalized and cleaned up considerably. Almost all the column names have been simplified, and I dropped a lot of cruft as well. You can see the current ChangeLog I have written up here.

The only thing that is left to do is write the documentation, which can be a little time-consuming. I want to make sure it’s done right, because I most likely won’t be touching it again for a few years. You can download the database dumps here.

Edit: An XML dump is available now as well.

In wanting to clean up alan-one a bit, I took a look this morning at my Nephite pages, which I haven’t done in a very long time. About half the pages on the Book of Mormon Adventures section were completely broken, which have probably been that way for a year or so. The tables weren’t even in the database, which is pretty horrible of me. I did some preliminary cleanup as much as I can, everything up until actually cleaning up the db structure and porting it to postgres or sqlite instead of mysql.

Working on it sure brought back some memories, though. I really love that little site, and all my projects in general. They were pretty much the first real public works I ever worked on. I hate the fact that I’ve been neglecting them for years, especially since it’s always been something in the back of my mind that I wanted to come back to and properly clean up.

One thing I had completely forgotten about was two short stories that I wrote, a long time ago. My first one was Gadianton’s Bandit, which I wrote on my mission, I believe … I’m not real sure of the exact timeline, but I know it was either right near the end or right after my mission. I do remember how I started writing it though.

Near the end of my mission, I was in the city of Neuquen (the province of Neuquen, in Argentina). For some reason, I got the idea to start writing a short story in my very limited free time, probably just as another measure to keep my sanity in a pretty stressful time. I started writing a short fantasy novel for another odd reason, and while it was a lot of fun, I had the hardest time coming up with a storyline that would fit and make sense. The writing was a lot of fun, but getting the story was near impossible. I made countless changes. I kinda gave up on the idea in frustration, and moved on after a few days. But then one morning I was reading my Book of Mormon and I read Helaman 11:33, which talks about the Gadianton robbers carrying away many people. I thought to myself, “Hmm, that would make a cool basis for a story,” and the idea persisted.

I ran with the idea, and this time, the story just came to me really quickly and I manged to get it all down really fast. Just like my (very old) poetry, my writing style is kinda similar to a stream of conciousness … I kind of just write the ideas as they come to me, with a general idea of where I’m going, and then after I’m done I make very few if any edits. So the story you’ll see on my website is probably pretty darn close to the original that I wrote so long ago. I haven’t read it again, yet. It’ll bring back too many memories and emotions. Those were some hard, but very good times.

I wrote a second one, which I completely forgot about … or rather, I knew I had started another one, but I didn’t think I finished it. I guess there is a third one somewhere in my archives. The second one is A Division Among the People, this time about the evil king Noah, and some things going on around him. You can read the actual account in the Book of Mormon in Mosiah 11 to 19. I like that one.

I need to get back into writing some more. The stories obviously are not great quality, but it was a lot of fun, and a faith-promoting experience.

Well, that was fast. I looked at the schema last night for the MDP Scriptures project, and started cleaning it up, and it went really quickly. I’ve got a postgres dump all ready for review, and this is probably the configuration I’ll use for the next release.

The major change was that I added a new table for the chapters. It seems a little odd having the chapter number in a table all its own, but for a normalized database schema it makes perfect sense. The only thing I don’t like is now you have to INNER JOIN across four tables just to get all the information. Most of the time you won’t need anything but book + chapter + verse, which is only three tables. I did create a sample view called view_verses which pulls them all together so you can easily run a select on some format like ‘Gen 1:1′. The thing I don’t like is that even that view is CPU intensive, so I may have to look at changing some stuff around.

Aside from that basic view, I’ve decided I’m not going to put all my fun ideas for functions and views in the packaged release. Instead, I’ll just have them either as a separate release, or just post them on the website since I’m sure they will evolve.

One really cool thing about postgres that I love is that you can have overloaded functions. I started playing with them a while back on this database, and came up with some cool concepts. One idea I want to implement is being able to run a select statment using a between on two verses. An example query would be: “SELECT * FROM view_verses WHERE verse_id BETWEEN verse(’Gen.’, 1, 5) AND verse(’Genesis’, 12); where the verse() function would be overloaded to take between one and three arguments: book, chapter and verse.

It’s pretty cool all the stuff you can do with postgres, and that’s definately where I’ll be focusing my attention in getting the goodies done.

Anyway, if you want to download this test schema, its available here. As always, feedback is welcome.

I was just channel flipping tonight looking to see what was on TV, and I stumbled on the very last part of a talk being given on BYU TV about types of Christ. I didn’t catch very much, but the speaker did go over something really cool that just blew me away — he covered a few verses from a chapter in Leviticus and showed their symbolic and spiritual significance. It was just so cool I couldn’t sleep and just had to document what he said as best as I can recall.

The passage was from Leviticus 14:1-9. If you read the verses, you’ll see that they seem rather boring and plain from the offset:

1. AND the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

2. This shall be the law of the leper in the day of his cleansing: He shall be brought unto the priest:

3. And the priest shall go forth out of the camp; and the priest shall look, and, behold, if the plague of leprosy be healed in the leper;

4. Then shall the priest command to take for him that is to be cleansed two birds alive and clean, and cedar wood, and scarlet, and hyssop:

5. And the priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water:

6. As for the living bird, he shall take it, and the cedar wood, and the scarlet, and the hyssop, and shall dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water:

7. And he shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose into the open field.

8. And he that is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes, and shave off all his hair, and wash himself in water, that he may be clean: and after that he shall come into the camp, and shall tarry abroad out of his tent seven days.

9. But it shall be on the seventh day, that he shall shave all his hair off his head and his beard and his eyebrows, even all his hair he shall shave off: and he shall wash his clothes, also he shall wash his flesh in water, and he shall be clean.

Now, I’ve read the Old Testament, and it is full of stuff like this that on first glance seems completely uninteresting and just plain weird, to be honest. And the speaker mentioned that reading this late at night, it would be easy to miss out on the significance of the message.

Take a look now at the same verses, but this time with a perspective on the spiritual side instead of the physical. I’ll try and document as much of his comments as I can remember, and add my own in as well.

2. This shall be the law of the leper in the day of his cleansing: He shall be brought unto the priest:

In this case the leper represents not really a person, but the sinner, or someone who has sinned and is seeking repentance. He must go unto a judge in Israel (the priest) who has the priesthood from God.

3. And the priest shall go forth out of the camp; and the priest shall look, and, behold, if the plague of leprosy be healed in the leper;

Sometimes the priesthood brethren must go out and seek the sinners. Going out of the camp also illustrates that the sinner in this case has been disfellowshipped, and cannot fully participate with the congregration. The priest then looks, and as judge, can determine if the sinner has fully repented or not.

4. Then shall the priest command to take for him that is to be cleansed two birds alive and clean, and cedar wood, and scarlet, and hyssop:

One of the two birds represent Christ, which will be made more clear pretty soon here, and the other the repentant sinner. The cedar wood is a symbol of the cross, the scarlet of the scarlet robe that was put around Him, and the hyssop the sponge given him when He thirsted on the cross.

5. And the priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water:

Christ came to earth to die for our sins.

6. As for the living bird, he shall take it, and the cedar wood, and the scarlet, and the hyssop, and shall dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water:

7. And he shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose into the open field.

It is Christ’s blood again that saves us. He also mentioned in his talk that seven is, symbolically, a number representing perfection … something I’ve heard before, but I’m not really clear on the concept, or even understand how or why (though you definately see it used often).

Once the leper is pronounced clean, he is set free and welcomed back into the congregation (I think … probably muddling that one up, I remember it slightly differently .. he said something about the open field I can’t properly recall).

8. And he that is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes, and shave off all his hair, and wash himself in water, that he may be clean: and after that he shall come into the camp, and shall tarry abroad out of his tent seven days.

9. But it shall be on the seventh day, that he shall shave all his hair off his head and his beard and his eyebrows, even all his hair he shall shave off: and he shall wash his clothes, also he shall wash his flesh in water, and he shall be clean.

Now this is the part I really didn’t understand, and couldn’t wait for him to explain. The other stuff made some sense (sacrifice, a priest intervening) but shaving off all your hair? I couldn’t imagine.

The answer is that a newborn is typically born without any hair, and this symbolizes the leper becoming born again as a baby. I never saw that one coming.

Absolutely fascinating stuff. I love reading the Old Testament, and it’s such a cool set of scriptures to read. There have been so many plain and precious truths removed from the Bible, but there is so much symbolism still there, and it’s always an awesome treat to find it and understand what it means. This is the stuff in studying scripture that I get really excited, is finding the types and shadows of Christ. Absolutely fascinating stuff. I wish that I had the ability to look past what I’m reading about and see the symbols more clearly. It’s so difficult to do, but it would just make everything make so much more sense if I could do it.

I hope I didn’t sound preachy on this post, that certainly wasn’t my intention. In fact, if anything, I completely butchered the presentation that was much nicer. I do just love studying the scriptures though, and it’s one habit I really need and want to get back into. There’s so much cool stuff to learn.

It looks like I found a copy of the talk, too. It’s called “The Power of the Atonement to Cleanse and Heal: Atonement Symbolism in the Old Testament”, and it was given by David Ridges at BYU Education Week on 8/19/02. You can find it here on their broadcasting site. They don’t have an individual link just for the talk, so you’ll have to search for it. I did find a direct RealPlayer audio link though, here. Good stuff

Something else I’m working on, related to alan-one, is I’m finally moving nephi.org back to my own hosting so I can properly take responsibility for it once more.

Most people have probably never heard of the site, since I never mention it, and my interest in working in it dropped off sharply about three years ago, and has been sputtering since then. The Nephite Network is basically a collection of small LDS websites that I like to put together on my own.

One reason for making it oh so long ago was that I noticed it was incredibly hard to find gospel websites related to my religion that were clearly non-biased and actually produced by faithful members. Hopefully it’s evident on this one which camp I belong to.

I realize right now that the content is extremely slim. In fact, the two major sections have been taken down to be revamped — Gospel Art Gallery and Family Theater Old Time Radio. I’m working on getting them back online … at least, I’ve got some ideas mulling about in my head and I’ve got to get to work on them, so hopefully sometime this year they will reappear. That’s my goal at least.

The one I’m really excited to work on, and it’s always been an extremely fun project for me, is the Scriptures website, where I have imported the entire canon of LDS scriptures into a few databases and then made them freely available for download. My last real big release was two years ago, almost to the day, and I’ve learned a lot more about databases since then. In fact, it is absolutely amazing to me how I managed to get so much stuff done with such a limited knowledge before. It just stands as a testament to me that the Lord has been helping me out. I honestly can’t take any credit for the milestones I’ve achieved.

I’m also planning on poking at the Mormon Documentation Project again. Since we just had General Conference the other week, it’s gotten me interested in working on the CDDB files again. I have no idea if anyone uses those or not, but I find them helfpul, and I’ve got almost all the disc sets anyway, so I don’t mind cleaning them up and passing them along. Also, the timeline project I started on so long ago looks like it’d be really fun to pick up again. I’ve been getting it in my head that I want to go back to doing a serious study of the scriptures again, and having a little project on the side to categorize my findings helps me both understand what I’m studying and motivate me to move along as well.

I don’t know how many of these lofty goals I’ll be able to actualy attend to, but I’m glad that the interest is at least buzzing once more … that for sure means that something will happen pretty soon. I tell you what.

Sometimes reading / studying my scriptures can get boring (a sure sign of apostasy, I’m sure … I’m doomed!), but it occurred to me the other day that while we are instructed to read our scriptures on a daily basis, nobody ever said anything about reading them in any certain order.

So, while I was tweaking the db layout of the lds_scriptures tables, I added a new table: chapters. Then I setup a view to pull out a random chapter and its verses. This works much better than me randomly flipping something open in my book, because if I do that then I usually land somewhere near the middle. This time, anything goes, baby! Anyway, I wrote a quick php script to pull them out, and put it on my server, so here you go — a random Book of Mormon chapter each time you refresh the page.

For some reason, *every* time I run it, I get a really long chapter that comes up. I think the Lord is trying to tell me something. Doh!