A single porch light glows across the night scene from my back window. The wind is blowing gently, but persuasively. A certain sadness seems entwined in this, and yet the warm glow of the Christmas lights that twinkle about me inside pulls me from waxing on too much about the cold I only see, and am not left to survive in this night. Such is 2007 as it bids us farewell.
Every year, Americans gather around their dining rooms to have holiday dinner. Unlike other special days of the year, however, this holiday is a holiday of intolerance. Of course, you know what holiday I am talking about, right? What day could I be referring to other than Thanksgiving?
For more than forty years of my life, I've been serving Christ. There are more stories there than several books can tell. Since I've read stories from the lives of others written far better, and more useful to building individual faith, than I could do, I'll confine myself to a little piece of my story here. It will be a little piece not often addressed in the stories of others, how faith trumps the politics and religious devotion many have to various expressions of high technology.
Four hundred and ninety years ago, an unremarkable Catholic monk posted a sheet of almost one hundred complaints at the place where people posted such things in those days. That would be a church door, and the monk, of course, would be Martin Luther. Unbeknownst to him at the time, he had just split the church into a group that would still be known for its “protesting” of Catholic doctrine a half millennia later: happy birthday, Protestant Church.
Of all the tasks in FreeBSD, setting up a broadband connection is probably one of the easiest. All the various BSDs are built around networking, and most broadband connections operate pretty much like an extended LAN, using the same hardware, often called an "ethernet" connection: something that looks like fat phone lines, which plug into similarly fat-looking sockets which resemble telephone jacks.
Few would deny that Apple's ill-fated Newton PDA was ahead of its time. While it would take a few more years and a few smart decisions by the company then known as Palm Computing to make a PDA that worked really well (the first Pilot), Apple was clearly on to something. Though Steve Jobs assassinated the device nearly a decade ago, it seems perhaps he has — in not so many words — started to bring it back to life.
So, how are you liking FreeBSD? Do you believe it's something you work with, live with day after day? If you find you've gotten used to it, maybe the time has come to get more acquainted with one of the best features of FreeBSD: It's relatively painless to update the entire system by rebuilding it from code. The emphasis is not so much slavishly chasing the cutting edge of BSD technology. Instead, our focus will be on security updates and optimization.
Dear Steve, so you've reached the big one million mark. There were a lot of doubters, but I knew you could do it all along. The iPhone exemplifies Apple's “think different” attitude, and that has helped it to fill a need that was really being ignored. This is Apple's chance to introduce many people to its philosophy of creativity and ease-of-use. But that leads us to an obvious question: why on earth are you making it so hard to do something as typical (and potentially creative) as creating custom ring tones — not to even mention adding applications?
In an age of digital photos and easy DVD burning, it is becoming common to take a set of photos and burn them into some form that can be played on a DVD player. A few weeks ago, for example, I was preparing a set of photos for a wedding DVD. There are a variety of ways to do this, but most of them give less than perfect results and control or they are too time intensive.