Category: Uncategorized

It’s been my experience that a lot of people who work in the IT and general technology sector are atheists. For example, The Register seems to adopt a fairly passive anti-religious tone in its articles (and a lot of the commenters follow suit, except they are usually less passive).

In technological circles particularly, bashing religion seems to be de rigeur. However, I’ve come across a lot of Christian people – some in fairly influential positions – who work in the field of IT and Computer Science. It is my contention that there are actually just as many Christians in IT as there are in other disciplines.

Here are a few people I’ve found. Some of them you may have heard of, some of them I’ve just sort of stumbled upon because I’ve been searching for something computer-related and browsed through the rest of their website, only to find out they were Christian!

• Jon Skeet. You have probably never heard of him, but he’s a bit of a legend over at Stack Overflow.
• Larry Wall. The creator of a language called Perl, you may have heard of it…
• Simon Cozens – speaking of Perl, Simon used to run perl.com and has written several books on Perl.
• Donald Knuth. This guy is the godfather of algorithms, his seminal “The Art of Computer Programming” is a classic, and he is respected by many programmers the world over.

I have found many such examples when searching the internet for help on computer-related problems, or browsing the biographies of famous programming people. Just goes to show, God loves everyone – even computer scientists!

On my post about confirmation (amongst other things), Matthew asked about my reasons for getting confirmed given my Baptist / FIEC background.

The short answer really is – there’s not actually a spiritual reason! I feel like over the past few months God has been pushing me towards ministry. Possibly ministry in the Anglican church, even. As such, I think that if in the future I did train to become an Anglican clergyman, I think me not being confirmed would present an issue for some people…

I do, of course, already count my baptism as a visible acknowledgement of my faith – which confirmation is also supposed to be – but simply as a matter of church order I thought confirmation would be a wise move on my part.

However, in terms of my theological position on infant baptism / confirmation… well although I was brought up and baptised (not as an infant) in an FIEC church, I do think there is some merit to the Anglican way of doing things. I heard a talk by Andy Saville at Fordham called “Why I am not… a Baptist” (it was part of a series. It’s not nearly as controversial as it sounds, and is available on the Fordham website – which is how I listened to it). Basically, the talk was about infant baptism – the arguments for and against it, whether it’s justifiable from the Bible and church tradition.

It does indeed seem that there is a good case to be made for infant baptism. It’s probably got a bad name because it has been abused – a lot of parents seem to want to have their children baptised but then don’t ever come back to church! But that doesn’t mean it’s a reason not to do it in proper circumstances.

And confirmation is really just a follow on from Baptism, allowing someone to confirm that they want to be part of the Christian faith as well as the church (and God!) confirming their acceptance into the church and wider Christian family. I love the actual confirmation part of the service, where the bishop presiding over the ceremony says “God has called you by name and made you his own”.

Finally, I should make clear that this is not at all a criticism of nonconformist churches! I still look back at my baptism and think that was an important day for me, that is when I publicly declared my Christian faith. I just wanted to say that I think confirmation is no bad thing for those who have grown up in the Anglican tradition, provided that people don’t see the act as more important than the state of the heart.

At Gift List Central, we’ve been setting up a few cron jobs – which are basically scheduled jobs that run at intervals you specify. So, for example, we have a job which runs daily to deactivate gift lists which have passed their due date.

Because we have cPanel, we are able to set up cron jobs from the web interface. This is useful, because PHP doesn’t provide you with any kind of cron natively. You can get scripts which simulate cron (pseudo-cron), but the downside to this is that if someone doesn’t visit your site, the cron job doesn’t get run. It also adds overhead into your script, as the crontab has to be checked every page load.

So, Unix cron is a good choice. The problem I had was – what command to run? There are various options: you can load up PHP natively (i.e. run the php interpreter from the command line and call your script directly). However, as we’re using CodeIgniter that’s not really an option – CodeIgniter expects to be called from the web. I had our code to be run regularly mapped to a controller, so /cron/deactivate_expired would execute the correct code and output a report – so really we needed to go in via the web.

No problem, wget to the rescue! wget is a small command line tool which will download files from remote servers for you, given a URL.

This is the actual command line we ended up using:

wget -q -O deactivate_expired.log http://www.giftlistcentral.co.uk/cron/deactivate_expired

Let me just explain that. wget is the name of the executable. -q turns on ‘quiet mode’ – this basically means wget doesn’t produce any output. If you don’t use this option, you will be emailed each time the cron job runs – probably not what you want! -O deactivate_expired.log writes out the output of our controller function to a log file. So, if our controller outputs “Job starting at … Job finished at…”, that will be written to the file.

Lastly, the URL is the address of the controller function we want to call which actually executes our code.

So there you have it – hopefully this will help someone else getting PHP cron to work!

Sorry about the lack of updates recently, it’s been a bit busy! This weekend was no exception. On Friday we had the 21 Christmas Party, which went well. Then on Saturday Phil was playing at a wedding at midday, so I met up with Chris I and his friend Eleanor in town for lunch, and then they came back for a cup of tea. Afterwards, Laura came round for a cup of tea, so we did lots of tea drinking that afternoon 🙂

In the evening, a work colleague of mine was playing in a band at the Cambridge Arms, so we went up there to hear them. Their set was great, the only bad thing about it was that it was too short!

On Sunday morning, I got confirmed. Yes, that’s right – I’d already been baptised, so I decided to go for the full set. Joking aside, I felt like it was a good thing for me to be doing – particularly thinking about potentially going into ministry in the future. It was a really good service, I think everyone enjoyed it (except for the kids – unfortunately it was quite long!).

After the service we went to the Anchor at Nayland for lunch with my parents and Phil’s parents. The food was delicious (as it always is there, or at least has been when we’ve got in the past!).

Afterwards we headed out to Eight Ash Green for the Lessons & Carols service.

And because it’s Tuesday, I’ll include Monday night… last night we went to the All Saints Club (basically Sunday School at Fordham) Leader’s Meal. Great food and great company, what more can I say?

Two things which made me think “EPIC WIN” (It’s kind of the opposite of “EPIC FAIL”, not sure whether it’s valid but still).

Firstly, Video Game Music Themes (sheet music). Check out the Mario themes – I’ve been playing the overworld theme from Mario 1 on the NES! I remember that from years ago, it’s burned into my memory. The only thing is, whenever I play it I feel like I should be doing sound effects on top of it. Sounds pretty good on piano too – although it’s quite difficult to play because, well, it’s not really designed for humans.

Secondly, the Random Band Name Generator. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but it is also brilliant. A few of my favourites: “Carol LaZonga and the Jerusalem Replicants”, “The Metaphysical Jugglers”, and “The Fish Coalition”. One day I will start a band, and name it “The Fish Coalition”. Oh yes.

So, this is just a quick precis of the weekend:

– 21 on Friday night, followed by “The IT Crowd” (again, very good this week)
– Down to Phil’s parents on Saturday, had good time
– Back to Fordham on Sunday morning for the Advent service
– Rest of the day spent not doing very much

There was something I was going to blog about here, but I’ve forgotten what it was. Doh!

Murphy’s Law is basically “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. Or, more generally, it’s all about irony. For example, if you haven’t prepared for some eventuality, it will happen. (Well, I suppose that’s more being unlucky than ironic, but still).

I had a great example of it recently. T-Mobile had been making things difficult for me in topping up my phone. I ran out of credit about a week or so ago, and tried to top up my phone online. No such luck: although the websites states that you can register up to four cards, and I only had two registered, I couldn’t register another one, and both of my previous ones were expired. Doh!

The stupid thing is, though – I’ve needed to call / text more people in the past week than I think I have in the past three months put together. Why? WHY?!!!! I swear this is some kind of universal constant – you will need something the minute you actually can’t. This particularly seems to happen with phones – as soon as you can’t actually text or call out from your mobile, you need to.

I say ditch mobile phones altogether :p

This weekend, Philippa was away from Friday night until Saturday evening. So, on Friday evening I watched “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, which I’ve been meaning to watch for ages but haven’t got around to it. It was a great film – I can see why it got about five oscars in one year! It was very sad at the end, but worth it. It also made me think how clever “Spaced” was – they managed to reference the original film quite accurately, while still managing to keep it part of the story! Oh, and I spotted a couple of references from Spaced which aren’t in the ‘restaurant’ episode. (Well, one reference at least).

Anyway. On Saturday I spent most of the day working on Gift List Central – it’s coming along quite well. Unfortunately I also managed to find a couple of other sites which do the same kind of thing – why couldn’t they have come up when I was searching BEFORE starting work on it? Doh! Still, one of them looks like it was started in 2008 so perhaps it’s not all bad. On the internet, competition is good – and they’ve given me a few ideas as well 😉

I also watched the latest episode of “The IT Crowd”. It was great – this series is shaping up to be as good as the first, after a rather disappointing second series.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning. In the afternoon we went to dinner with one of Phil’s work colleagues and her fiance – they are getting married in December and I am DJing at the wedding, so we discussed the music. It was good fun, and I think I’ve got a much better idea now of the kind of thing that they want.

Since July of this year I’ve been working with Matthew on a little project.

Well, it’s finally ready to go live, and I am proud to unveil it today: Gift List Central (GLC for short) is officially open! There may still be a few issues to iron out, but the functionality is pretty much there and you can login and create gift lists to your heart’s content.

I thought I’d probably better explain a bit about what GLC is while I’m on the subject. When Phil and I got married, we were a bit frustrated: we didn’t want to go with a big chain (such as Debenhams) for our wedding gift list. We actually went with an Excel spreadsheet, which my Mum and Phil’s Mum kept updated!

At the time I did contemplate writing a website which would let people set up gift lists, but never actually got around to it. Anyway, that was a couple of years ago. Fast forward to last summer. I thought about the idea again (partly due to the large number of weddings we’ve had to go to this year), and I spoke to Matthew about it and suggest working together. Strangely enough, he had a similar idea when he and Ellie got married.

So, we started working on a website, and it started to take shape pretty quickly. The end result is Gift List Central as you see it now. The design work is all Matthew’s, whereas I did most of the coding.

As the name suggests, it’s not just for weddings – you can use it for weddings of course, but it’s for any gift list. Currently we’re focussed on a Christmassy theme, as it’s less than a month to Christmas 😉 Please do feel free to sign up for an account (currently it’s all completely FREE), and let us know what you think. We’d love to hear from you, if you have any comments / ideas / suggestions. If you have any death threats or the like, well, please just address those to Matthew and not me 😉

Bring it on: we’ve just booked tickets to go and see Coldplay in September next year at Wembley. Sweeeeet.

This means that in 2009 we will be seeing two of our favourite bands – Keane and Coldplay … if we could get to a Muse gig as well that would make it a hat trick! Unfortunately I don’t think the bank would take the strain, but still. Really looking forward to next year 🙂