Month: January 2005

A Concise Review

I started reading “A Concise History of the Catholic Church” because my friend Matt, who went through RCIA with my wife, decided that he knew very little about the history of his new faith and wanted to do some informal study on the Catholic Church.  Now, my knowledge of early Catholic history consists of what I have read in the New Testament and a general assumption on my part that there was probably a Pope John Paul the first and that, just maybe, there was a prequel to Vatican II (although I was not entirely sure.)   “A Concise History of the Catholic Church” was the book we picked up to enlighten our historical Catholic viewpoint.

The book was pretty good.  It gave a high level overview of the major historical trends and treaties of the Church over the last 2000 years or so.  It tries to go into more depth on topics that the author feels are a good barometer of Church trends at the time.  These “low level” views were helpful to get a better picture of the place of the Church at a given historical period.  In addition the book was good about covering a good balance between the, admittedly rocky, political history of the Church and its spiritual progress.

I thought that most of the book was fairly balanced (as balanced as you can expect a book about the Catholic Church to be.)  The only disappointment I found was an obvious bias on the part of the author toward the modern progressive Catholic Movement (i.e. liberation theology, historical literalism, etc.) and a fairly vocal disappointment in the lack of support from the current Pontiff for these ideas.  I am a huge supporter of the Church’s current position on world social issues; something the author is evidently not.

Overall I would rate the book as a good read, especially if you want to learn about the pre-twentieth century Catholic Church. The shear number of references and quotes make it an excellent “start point” for further Catholic study.  The history of the Catholic Church is not a study in perfection; but any institution whose historical linage can be traced back almost 2000 years is bound to be interesting.

Of Eldar and Silmarils

I first read The Silmarillion when I was 12.  For someone who has been a Tolkien fan for almost his entire life,  The Silmarillion is not simply a good book.  It is required reading.  Admittedly more difficult to follow than The Lord of the Rings; yet it, in many ways, more completely fulfills the depth of culture and history that Tolkien has always tried to bestow.  The Silmarillion coves the long history of the Elves and the first age of Middle-Earth.  It is the Bible of Middle-Earth.  It’s as glorious as it is heartbreaking.  It is easily one of the most “unique” books I have ever read, combining fantasy with history; biography with myth.

If you are a fan of Tolkien’s world, and not simply a fan of the movies, then I strongly recommend reading this book.  It will leave you in awe of the “completeness” of the world that Tolkien created.  Its one of my most prized books.

Gtk vs. Qt

Linux developers have argued the benefits of any given language/toolkit sense the beginning of time.  One of the oldest debates is between Gnome/KDE.  As anyone who knows me (or reads this blog) can tell you I have a strong attraction to KDE because of its design strength and flexibility.  However I was not always a KDE fan.  I started as a Gnome user/developer when I first began on Linux.  At the time I thought Linux’s development tools (through my Gnome/Gtk experience) were pretty bad; but were getting better.

Then, one day, I discovered KDE/QT and have never regretted the decision.  I went from thinking that Linux development was harder/worse than Win32 development to realizing that Linux/KDE/QT development was better than ANYTHING else out there.  Think that C#/.NET is nice?  .NET is a giant leap forward in Win32 development, but still way behind QT/KDE development!  Any who, I found a couple articles that I read, back in “the day”, that helped me decided to give KDE/QT a try and I wanted to pass them along.

  • Toolkit Comparison — Compare Gtk to QT.  Its my experience that that 30% numbers specified are VERY conservative.
  • Why I Left Gtkmm — Comments concerning one of the “better” C++ toolkits for Gnome.
  • Gtkmm vs. Qt — Same author as above, more comments and responses to Gtkmm apologists.
  • Why Qt — Third article by said author.  Random thoughts about his project, Gnome, KDE, Gtk+, Qt, C, and C++.
  • More Qt — kuro5hin article on Qt.
  • Why Program for KDE — Dispels some of the more popular KDE myths.

Nietzsche vs. Socrates

The New Criterion has a wonderful article discussing Julien Benda’s work, “La Trahison des clercs” (The treason of the intellectuals), and an extension of Benda’s work by Alain Finkielkraut titled, “La Défaite de la pensée” (The Undoing of Thought.)  I had heard of the term La Trahison des clercs, a kind of yuppie insult to post modern leaning college professors, but I was not actually familiar with the contents of the work.

I found the article incredible interesting and will probably comment more on it at some other time, but what is most interesting to me is how this concept ties in with the idea of natural law (for example the destruction of diversity without a fundamental concept of the “universality of humanity”) and the effect that these concepts have on the implementation of free will.  I many ways this article acts like a philosophical discussion of the ideas presented in C.S. Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man.”

KDE on the command Line, Part #1

One of the strengths of Linux is the ability of the operating system to work in either graphical user interface mode (aka GUI), like Windows 2000; or command line mode; like DOS.  The reason this is an advantage is that in many cases the addition of GUI components to the interface just add unneeded bulk.  Who needs a GUI on a web server?  The other advantage comes from extensive amount of fine grain flexibility that is possible with the command line.  Something that is simply not possible in a GUI.  For example the grep program (a text processing utility in Unix) has thousands of possible options.  Imagine trying to make a usable  GUI program with literally thousands of options.

One noticeable problem exists.  Historically working on the command line meant that you functionally lost the use of GUI tools when not in GUI mode.  For example, you want to read an entry in your GUI address book but only have command line access to your computer.  One would think you would be out of luck.  In addition, some applications gave you no way to control GUI programs from the command line

However, the superb design and tremendous flexibility of KDE has created an incredible bridge between these two worlds.  For example, want to use your KDE trash can while using the command line?  Try this:

kfmclient move <url> trash:/

kfmclient is a tool for opening and accessing file from the command line.  kfmclient automatically uses your KDE preferences to handle command translation.  Here is another example.  Say you want to open a file with your default KDE application handler (whatever that may be.)

kfmclient exec file:/home/weis/data/test.html

or specify your own program to open the file with (even non KDE programs)

kfmclient exec file:/home/weis/data/test.html mozilla

Why is this useful?  Because kfmclient understands KDE kio and dcop information you can specify anything that you would normally do in Konqueror.  This works particularly well for bash scripting.  Say you want to have a program that opens your remote computers /etc/groups file, over ssh, with THAT computer users default editor?  Here is a quick two line bash program for just such a case:

#!/bin/bash
kfmclient exec fish://192.168.1.25:/etc/groups

It will even open up the username/password dialog for you (don’t forget to check the “remember password” check box to have kwallet store the username and password.)  I gotta go for now, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.