wonkablog

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!

I have not worked on my LDS Scriptures project in a very long time.  In fact, annual realeases are becoming an embarrassing reality.  However, I’ve been itching to update the project for a while now, since I’ve been learning quite a lot more about databases since my last release.

I had an interesting idea for doing some custom RSS feeds of pulling down scriptures (which I’ll get into at a later time), but I quickly realized the current db schema wasn’t quite up to par.  I started poking around the postgres one, and it was much easier than I imagined to fix it up quite a bit.  I dropped all the tables and recreated them, this time with primary and foreign keys, and I got rid of some columns that were completely unnecessary.  I renamed some too, along with the other general cleanup.

I tarballed the snapshot once I was finished.  This isn’t what I’m going to release as the final 3.0 version, since I still need to add things like views and more indexes, but this is the direction I’m going to be heading.  You can download the snapshot tarball here.  Feedback is welcome, as always.

Reading my scriptures this morning, I came upon Alma 46 (in the Book of Mormon). This is the chapter where Moroni raises the title of liberty, and though I’ve read this many times before, for some reason it really stirred me up this morning. I thought it was pretty cool, and wanted to share a select part of it, but it’s so good, I’m just gonna copy most of it, since it’s such a great story.

A quick background explanation is probably in order, too. This takes place in the Americas, 73 B.C., to a people then called the Nephites and Lamanites. The Lamanites (native Americans, now … all the Nephites were destroyed, which is a major topic in the Book of Mormon) had just lost a major war to the Nephites, but now there is dissension from within by a man named Amalackiah who wants to be king.

1. And it came to pass that as many as would not hearken to the words of Helaman and his brethren were gathered together against their brethren.

2. And now behold, they were exceedingly wroth, insomuch that they were determined to slay them.

3. Now the leader of those who were wroth against their brethren was a large and a strong man; and his name was Amalickiah.

4. And Amalickiah was desirous to be a king; and those people who were wroth were also desirous that he should be their king; and they were the greater part of them the lower judges of the land, and they were seeking for power.

5. And they had been led by the flatteries of Amalickiah, that if they would support him and establish him to be their king that he would make them rulers over the people.

6. Thus they were led away by Amalickiah to dissensions, notwithstanding the preaching of Helaman and his brethren, yea, notwithstanding their exceedingly great care over the church, for they were high priests over the church.

7. And there were many in the church who believed in the flattering words of Amalickiah, therefore they dissented even from the church; and thus were the affairs of the people of Nephi exceedingly precarious and dangerous, notwithstanding their great victory which they had had over the Lamanites, and their great rejoicings which they had had because of their deliverance by the hand of the Lord.

8. Thus we see how quick the children of men do forget the Lord their God, yea, how quick to do iniquity, and to be led away by the evil one.

9. Yea, and we also see the great wickedness one very wicked man can cause to take place among the children of men.

10. Yea, we see that Amalickiah, because he was a man of cunning device and a man of many flattering words, that he led away the hearts of many people to do wickedly; yea, and to seek to destroy the church of God, and to destroy the foundation of liberty which God had granted unto them, or which blessing God had sent upon the face of the land for the righteous’ sake.

(more…)

Okay, so the news is starting to pick this stuff up. PC Magazine has a good writeup about it that covers the rights, while the Salt Lake Tribune fails to cover that stuff in detail whatsover.

What really irks me is this quote from the federal judge in California, “The right to control the content of the copyrighted work … is the essence of the law of copyright.” I thought the fundamental purpose of copyright was who has rights to copy something, not control it’s post-purchase status. Apparently I missed that boat.

Plus, the slashdot zealots are still at it with more nonsense, “This decision is based on the same principle that powers the GPL: The right to control Derivative Works! The GPL could not control the terms licences of derivative works without the basic right to control derivative works!”

By that same ruling, any “editing” that I do personally is also a derivative work. So, I guess now it’s against the law to rip a DVD myself and take out parts of it, since I’m creating a “derivative work.” Someone sue me.

While I personally don’t use or care too much about the businesses that “clean” the films, I do find it insane that our rights are being trampled on so much more, and I can’t understand why more people don’t see this as a copyright and fair use issue more than anything else.

I’m tempted to help out Jacob and start a site just with mplayer edit decision lists and distribute them for free so people can ignore the “naughty bits”, if only to piss off Hollywood even more.

I’m actually *really* surprised that nobody on Utah Open Source Planet has blogged about the latest story in the Slashdot headlines, about the “naughty bits” decision. It just hit the front page for the second time (once an original post, now as a Backslash article). What is everyone’s take on it? I’m curious.

Now, while I’m too lazy to read court documents (much less understand them), I’m not really going to say much about anything other than where I stand on the principles. I agree with one commentor, that the ruling extends beyond just a ‘Cleanflix’ type business model, and it instead extends into the realm of what copyright owners can do with the content that you legally purchased (licensed, rent-to-own, whatever).

As far as I understand it, this is how the “edited movies” business model works — it removes itself from the crosshair because the movie is already owned by the customer. They just make a copy of that for them and digitally remove some parts for them. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. I’m writing my own DVD ripping script right now which does something slightly different — it doesn’t alter the movie itself, but it does completely ignore the commercials, ads, menus, and almost all the audio tracks. Aren’t I also altering the original copyright holder’s vision of duplication?

Anyway, it comes as no shock to me that evil men have it in their interests to destroy our liberty, and it certainly comes as even less as a surprise that most of Slashdot approves of the ruling because it somehow strikes a blow to morality and Christianity. What they fail to realize, of course, is that all liberty such as civil rights stem from the same root of morality. You can’t defend evil (the right for artists to not let an audience to choose their level of filtering) and good (allow fair use) at the same time.

The whole thing disgusts me, personally.

I went up to Temple Square today, and went into the Museum of Church History and Art. They are doing another international art competition and I have to say — the entires are absolutely amazing.

If you get a chance, head up to Salt Lake and check them out. There were a few that really got me choked up looking at them. Beautiful, incredible stuff.

I went to Institute the other night with Jared. That was the first time I think I’ve stepped in there for at least two years. What a slacker. The first twenty minutes of it, I was totally engrossed, but after that my tolerance level maxed out, so I sat there for another hour just waiting to leave.

I did pick up some cool tidbits while I was actually paying attention, though. The best one was that the teacher talked about how in Lehi’s dream, that those who held to the rod had to go through the world, instead of around it. That kinda struck home.

I can remember a few more things than that, but I’d totally butcher the delivery, so I’ll just hold off. It was cool to go, though.

My friend and LDS OSS cohort Charles Fry has done me a huge favor and packaged fortune-mod-mormon for Debian.

I don’t have any Debian-based distro installed anywhere on my boxes, and even if I did I don’t think I could figure out how to install a 3rd-party package, so if anyone would be nice enough to try these out and let me know if there are any problems, that would rock. Or, if there aren’t problems, tell me that too, so I can put them up on Sourceforge.

Download here: http://mdp.nephi.org/download/debian/

Oh, and I’ll have a Gentoo ebuild ready soon.

I just uploaded fortune-mod-scriptures v1.1.0 to SourceForge. Unlike fortune-mod-mormon, the mod-scriptures package contains only modules from the King James Version of the Bible. The idea behind having two separate releases is two-fold: one, to have a good set of scriptures modules that anyone can use, and two to get it into the hands of more people who aren’t interested in the LDS canon. Hopefully this will fulfill both roles.

Anyway, there’s only so much I can say about this package, so go ahead and download it from SourceForge here.

I also finally made some Gentoo ebuilds, which I’ll release and post to b.g.o once I’m positive they are working well.   Plus, if anyone knows how to make some RPMs for Suse, Fedora, Red Hat, Mandriva, etc, I would really appreciate the help!

A good friend and I were talking about communication and pride for a while today on IM, and I thought it would be good to look up Pres. Benson’s old talk on the matter, and take a good look at it again.

“Beware of Pride”