An old friend called me up yesterday to ask me how I saw my Christianity and my programming working together. (I have some strange friends.) I didn't have any good answers at the time, but it got me thinking. I still don't have any good answers about the relationship between Christianity and computing, and I don't know if there are any, to be honest. It all seems a bit up in the air, you know, having to come up with a theology of everything you do - it smacks of overspiritualising life. But that's precisely what folk like Mark Greene of the LICC encourage people to do, and he's one of the most down-to-earth blokes I know. Besides, why should your spiritual life and your "work" life be separate? I've even preached that they shouldn't, so maybe I should put that into practice and have a theology of computer science.

Remember a while back I wrote about this groupware server I was developing? Well, here it is.

Years before people were creaming off about Active Record and Ruby on Rails, we were doing all that in Perl. The general principle behind Active Record is called "object relational mapping", since, predictably, it maps a relational database onto objects in your programming language. There's a chapter of Advanced Perl Programming about this and how it works.

So, after helping my mother with the genealogical research part of her project, I picked up the tricks and techniques for doing it myself; I've since become interested in finding a bit more about my own roots. On the Cozens side, I've got things as far back as 1844, which in genealogical terms is last week, but on my mother's side I've done a bit better.

OK, how's this for a bug? If:

I used to be thoroughly confused about Mozilla extensions and how you plug in stuff to work with Firefox and Thunderbird. Since my experiments with writing Songbee, I've become much happier with XUL and Javascript and therefore the whole extension concept, and looking back, it's actually very simple. Perhaps one day I'll write a nice easy tutorial about how to do it. Perhaps, though, it's better just to say that it's actually not as scary as it looks.

A while ago I wrote

Hey, what do you think of this? I'll be munging this blog to fit the design soon, and maybe trying to fit Memories into it as well.

You know, now I've got this lovely svn/trac infrastructure set up, it's much harder for me to play stupid about source control like I used to; really, it's just two commands for me to put a new project set up and get all the source under version control. And this time I know what the commands are, so absolutely no excuse.

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