OTProf

Time To Read

2009-08-10T11:30:00.003-04:00

I may not be much for blogging in the coming months. I'm sure I'll sneak one in from time to time but don't count on it. I've got a lot reading and studying ahead of me. I will be more active at EKFocus.

Hebrew Transliteration and Pronominal Suffixes

2009-07-18T11:45:00.005-04:00

I have now added into Quisition two new Hebrew vocab packs. The first is Hebrew letters with their transliterated values. This will serve anyone that needs to read scholarly literature which often uses transliterated values for the Hebrew letters. The second pack is the pronominal suffixes which occur on nouns, prepositions, and the definite direct object marker. These suffixes are also very similar to the ones that appear on Hebrew verbs, thus, learning this set is doubly helpful.

I think this is the last of the Hebrew vocab packs that I plan on adding to Quisition for a little while. Next up is Aramaic!

More Help with Hebrew

2009-07-13T20:48:00.002-04:00

If you have trouble nailing down Hebrew Independent Personal Pronouns and Hebrew Demonstrative Pronouns then head over to Quisition.

Pronominal suffixes are on their way!

Need Help with Hebrew?

2009-07-11T18:32:00.002-04:00

Hebrew Anytime Paradigms

This is a one page document which lists several paradigms which are handy to have memorized when one sets out to study Hebrew. Here is sample of the page:

Need Help with Greek?

2009-07-11T15:17:00.003-04:00

Greek Anytime Paradigms

This is a one page document which lists several paradigms which are handy to have memorized when one sets out to study Greek. Here is sample of the page:

Google Chrome OS

2009-07-08T09:10:00.003-04:00

I can't believe that it is finally here! Google has just announced Google Chrome OS. Everyone knew that this was inevitable but now it has finally occurred. Very soon it looks like this will be available.

Very exciting times. One more reason for my child to one day ask, "Now, who was Microsoft again?"

Gmail Comes of Age

2009-07-07T12:12:00.003-04:00

Finally, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk are officially released. All this really means is that the familiar "BETA" tag that was underneath each of the respective icons will be removed today. When I first checked my email it was still there, however, I logged out, refreshed the page, and logged in again only to find that I'm BETA free!

The software hasn't changed any more than it did yesterday or 2 weeks ago. The real key is that Gmail is a web app that is always evolving. Likely, new features will continue to be introduced via the Labs feature and then slowly, if successful, moved into the final applicaiton for all to use.

Here's to Gmail!

Hebrew Vocab at Quisition

2009-07-02T15:10:00.003-04:00

I've now been able to enter in all words in the Hebrew Bible that occur more than 50 times but less than 139 times. I've got down as low as I plan on going for a while but I'm still working on the higher numbers. I plan on having all of the words occurring more than 50 times entered in by the fall. Perhaps this will serve as an aid to first year Hebrew students beginning their study in Fall 2009. I've got about 292 more words to add in to accomplish that, definitely tenable by the fall.

I would also like to add in some different types of cards. I found it helpful for me to memorize pronominal suffixes, relative pronouns, personal pronouns, numbers, and even the verb paradigms with vocab cards. Ideally, those will be entered in sometime soon as well.

I've got an itch to start adding in Aramaic as I will be taking that in the Spring of 2010. If I have them all added in beforehand then I'll benefit from the site's intelligence as I set out to learn yet another Semitic language!

Follow my progress in adding in Hebrew vocab cards.

Laptop Anyone?

2009-06-26T14:40:00.001-04:00

I'm selling my trusty laptop. Anyone interested?
http://tinyurl.com/systemax-laptop

Quisition

2009-06-23T16:48:00.004-04:00

Quisition is wonderful. The site allows anyone to create vocabulary cards with anything on either side of the card and then allows everyone else to use those cards. Thus, if you want to learn Biblical Greek vocabulary or Biblical Hebrew vocabulary while at the same time memorizing simple addition, then Quistion is the site for you. The best part is that the software is smart, it keeps track of which cards you've got right and which ones you've missed so that it can quiz you appropriately.

I'm currently working on adding in Biblical Hebrew according to word frequency. Right now I've got the middle section of words added in. Basically, I'm memorizing down to 50x this summer so by August Hebrew vocab should be entered in from about 120x down to 50x word occurences.

Language Instruction

2009-05-26T06:01:00.000-04:00

Here is a link to a four part series discussing classical language instruction: http://jeltzz.blogspot.com/2009/05/conversational-dead-languages-i.html

All in all I tend to agree with author. One of my largest frustrations with my language instruction is that so little of it has been devoted to helping me learn to read the texts. I've longed for a professor that would require us to read the text, not just a verse or two, but large chunks of the text. I've finally come to an independent study course that will allow me to head down that road with Hebrew. Thus far, it has been a joyous, albeit time-consuming, experience!

Historical Exegesis

2009-05-25T05:26:00.000-04:00

"The Bible is such a historically oriented revelation that ignoring historical context tends to assure misinterpretation."

Stuart, Douglas, Old Testament Exegesis (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 52.

Wild Turkey

2009-05-23T16:42:00.001-04:00

Here is a video of a Wild Turkey that my wife and I saw in our driveway.

Erasmus on Grammar

2009-05-23T12:22:00.002-04:00

"Nor do I assume that theology, the very queen of all disciplines, will think it beneath her dignity if her handmaiden, grammar, offers her help and the required service. For even if grammar is somewhat lower in dignity than other disciples, there is no other more necessary. She busies herself with the very small questions, without which no one progresses to the large. She argues about trifles which lead to serious matters. If they answer that theology is too important to be limited by grammatical rules and that this whole affair of exegeting depends on the Holy Spirit, then this is indeed a new honor for the theologian that he alone is allowed to speak like a barbarian. Shall we now attribute our errors to the Holy Spirit?"

Erasmus, Preface to Valla's Annotations on the New Testament

Good Application in Exegesis

2009-05-18T04:57:00.000-04:00

"Subjectivity is the primary enemy of good application. When people think that they can derive from a passage an application somehow relevant to them but not to others, or somehow unique to one passage but not even comparable to the applications of genuinely similar passages, the probability of logical consistency is reduced and the likelihood of accuracy is threatened."

Stuart, Douglas, Old Testament Exegesis (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 26.

Searching for Exegesis

2009-05-15T16:50:00.004-04:00

"The more of these sorts of works you have via computer software, including online access, the faster your exegesis work can go because of the time saved in searching. On the other hand, speed is not always an advantage: searching through a book forces you to see things in context in a way that searching via search engines prevents you from doing."

Stuart, Douglas, Old Testament Exegesis (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 3.

rsync Home Backup Script

2009-05-11T21:52:00.006-04:00

I recently had trouble with a very good backup utility, rdiff-backup. I have always liked its functionality and it usually worked very well for me. However, I ran in to some trouble and somehow my backup information got corrupted, which kept the program from completing subsequent backups. This is not good. Because it was a bit of an obscure program and because I realized that I was using a program that I couldn't very easily dissect and because I was afraid that my actual data may become corrupt I decided to switch to another backup utility.

The process of searching for another backup utility turned south when I realized that there wasn't really any that did what I wanted. Here is all I wanted:

Backup my /home/jkag/ directory, except all of the hidden files (.*)
Keep incremental changes in an easy to get to location so that I could hand restore them as needed
Be executable via cron
Something written in Python would have been nice, but really, whatever worked would have been fine
Keep a simple and easy to read log of everything that happened during the backup run

To me, this sounded like a pretty basic set of requirements for running backups. In fact, I figured everyone else (who is running Linux) would be doing the same thing. Yet, I was wrong, I found it very difficult to find a program that worked to my liking. I did look at http://www.diffingo.com/oss/fwbackups but that turned in to something much more complicated than I desired (installation in particular).

All of this history to say that I decided it would be easier to write my own backup script. I had done this several times in Windows, using xcopy. I knew that it would be fairly simple to write a bash script, utilizing rsync, to do all of this. So that's what I did, here it is!

#! /bin/bash

#Variables
BACKUPTIME="`date +%m-%d-%Y`"
SOURCEDIR="/home/jkag/"
BACKUPDIR="/opt/Backup/jkag"
LOGDIR="/opt/Backup/rsync-backup.log"
INCREMENTSDIR="/opt/Backup/jkag-increments/$BACKUPTIME"
MYTITLE="================================="
MYSUBTITLE="------------------"

#Log formatting
echo $MYTITLE >> $LOGDIR
echo $BACKUPTIME >> $LOGDIR
echo $MYTITLE >> $LOGDIR
echo "BEGIN BACKUP" >> $LOGDIR
echo $MYSUBTITLE >> $LOGDIR
echo >> $LOGDIR

#This script syncronizes the home directory with the backup directory and puts backups of changed and deleted files into a folder with the current date in the jkag-increments directory
mkdir $INCREMENTSDIR
rsync -avb --delete --exclude ".*" --backup-dir=$INCREMENTSDIR $SOURCEDIR $BACKUPDIR >> $LOGDIR

#Log formatting
echo >> $LOGDIR
echo "END BACKUP" >> $LOGDIR
echo $MYSUBTITLE >> $LOGDIR
echo >> $LOGDIR
echo >> $LOGDIR

However, the whole time I knew that I would really rather be writing this script in Python. So, after I wrote it out and tested it in bash I went ahead and rewrote it in Python. This was a lot of fun! Here are the Python scripts.

rsync-backup.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

#This script syncronizes the home directory with the backup directory and puts backups of changed and deleted files into a folder with the current date in the jkag-increments directory
import os
from time import asctime
import restformat

#Variables
backupruntime = asctime()
sourcedir = "/home/jkag/"
backupdir = "/opt/Backup/jkag"
incrementsdir = '/opt/Backup/jkag-increments/' + backupruntime

#Logging
backuplog = open('/opt/Backup/rsync-backup.py.log', 'a')
print >> backuplog, (restformat.title(backupruntime))
print >> backuplog, ('Making increments directory: "' + incrementsdir + '"\n')

#Make incrementsdir
os.mkdir(incrementsdir)

#Logging
print >> backuplog, (restformat.subtitle('BEGIN BACKUP'))
backuplog.close()

#Run rsync backup command with Linux logging
os.system('rsync -avb --delete --exclude ".*" --backup-dir=' + '"' + incrementsdir + '" ' + sourcedir + ' ' + backupdir + ' >> ' + '/opt/Backup/rsync-backup.py.log')

#Logging
backuplog = open('/opt/Backup/rsync-backup.py.log', 'a')
print >> backuplog, (restformat.subtitle('END BACKUP'))
print >> backuplog, ('\n\n')
backuplog.close()

restformat.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

def title(mytitle='reStructeredText Title'):
'Returns mytitle formatted as a reStructeredText title.'
return '=================================' + '\n' + mytitle + '\n' + '================================='

def subtitle(mysubtitle='reStructeredText Subtitle'):
'Returns mysubtitle formatted as a reStructeredText subtitle.'
return mysubtitle + '\n' + '---------------------------------'

Remember, one of my requirements was to have an easy to read log of what was going on, that is why I used reStructuredText formatting. Below is a sample log output from the Python script.

=================================
Mon May 11 21:46:27 2009
=================================
Making increments directory: "/opt/Backup/jkag-increments/Mon May 11 21:46:27 2009"

BEGIN BACKUP
---------------------------------
sending incremental file list
./
Unsaved Document 1
Desktop/
Desktop/computer.png
...[output truncated]...

sent 1279685 bytes received 6677 bytes 367532.00 bytes/sec
total size is 115368531000 speedup is 89685.90
END BACKUP
---------------------------------

Enjoy!

Beautiful Piece of Music

2009-05-03T22:28:00.000-04:00

Basic Bible Stats

2009-04-22T12:19:00.003-04:00

Here are some basic Bible statistics based on the original languages.

Old Testament - From Van Pelt, Miles V. and Gary D. Pratico, The Vocabulary Guide to Biblical Hebrew, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), ix.

Total number of words: 419,687
Total vocabulary: 8679

New Testament - From Statistik des neutestamentlichen Wortschatzes (Zurich, 1958) in Metzger, Bruce M. Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1997), 1.

Total number of words: 137,490
Total vocabulary: 5436

This means that the Hebrew Bible contains 3.052 times the number of words as the Greek New Testament. Further, the OT has 1.596 times the number of vocabulary terms as the NT.

The Sacrifice of Isaac

2009-04-15T06:00:00.000-04:00

"It ought to be remembered that Isaac was surrendered to God not merely as an object of paternal affection, but as the exponent and instrument and pledge of the fulfillment of all the promises, which thus appeared to perish with his death."

Vos, Geerhardus, Biblical Theology, (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1975), 84.

Fusion-io, Faster Than Ever

2009-04-06T15:13:00.004-04:00

The future of hard drives looks very bright. Hard drives have been pretty boring for the last several years, they haven't changed a whole lot. But, take a look at this article about Fusion-io's new hard drive performance: http://blogs.amd.com/work/2009/04/06/a-million-reasons-why/

That is correct, just over 1 million IOPS.

Also, this article gives a little more information about the technology they are using: http://www.pr-inside.com/fusion-io-breaks-storage-performance-barriers-r1166023.htm

A Graphical Word Study

2009-04-01T13:15:00.008-04:00

At best, this is a provisional study. That said, take a look at these fascinating screenshots. I used the Word Locator tool from OpenBible.info to obtain them.
I say this is provisional because there are several problems with these images. First, the data is based on the wonderful ESV translation of the Scriptures. This is only a problem in so far as the words of the ESV are not the same words that we find in the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Further, the ESV has translated some Hebrew words in a variety of different ways in English and they have translated a variety of Hebrew words with the same English word, this may skew the images (though this is not bad for the ESV as it makes for a good English translation). As you can see from the second screenshot, I have already tried to deal with this to a small degree by including "mercy" and "grace" in the same cateogory because these two words have a similar meaning and the translation from the original into English is not always uniform.

The second problem with this study is that the words that I looked up include any word that is based on the root. To use the example that OpenBible.info cites, searching for "sin" will include "Sinai." Because these two words have different concepts in mind, this skews the images also. However, another instance of this phenomenon would be the inclusion of "lawful" with the search term "law." Clearly, this would not drastically skew the images because the concept that we are trying to view is that of law, which includes "lawful." Put differently, the concept of law contains the concept of lawful whereas the concept of sin does not contain the concept of Sinai.

The reason why I think these screenshots are so fascinating is that they (may) shatter some common misconceptions about the Bible, particularly in regards to the Old Testament. For starters, it should shatter the myth that the OT is all about law and the NT is all about grace. Now granted, these images don't provide the context in which these ideas are discussed but it does provide a relative frequency. If you notice, per capita, the NT is much more interested in discussing law then the OT.

The second screenshot shows, visually, that the concepts of mercy and grace are in no-wise foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures. One may notice that the NT shows a conglomeration of the word "grace," whereas the OT seems to use "mercy" much more. I think this is the image that is most slanted because of translational issues. For example, this graph leaves out the Hebrew word חסד (chesed) which certainly carries these concepts in its meaning of "steadfast love," "lovingkindness," or "loyalty."

The last screenshot is a freebie. The point of this one, I hope, is perspicuous. Sin is a problem. From the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation the Bible addresses sin in a multitude of contexts and a plethora of real life situations. The Scriptures surely recognize sin and are at great pains to deal with the issue. I can't help but ask the follow-up question, are we at great pains to deal with sin in the 21st century? Reading the Bible may be a good place to start!

Animated Hebrew

2009-04-01T07:30:00.001-04:00

The AnimatedHebrew website is a great resource for anyone who is learning Hebrew or anyone looking for resources to help others learn Hebrew. Of note for the comedians out there is their Hebrew version of the Abbott and Costello routine. You will not be disappointed.

Fetal Development

2009-03-31T13:32:00.006-04:00

Randy Alcorn tipped me off to a great slideshow from WebMD about fetal development. You will find the slideshow quite fascinating, should you choose to look.

Likewise, their conception slideshow is very intriguing.

Windows Firefox + Flash on Linux

2009-03-30T19:34:00.003-04:00

This is not new information. I'm just presenting it again for anyone who is interested in doing the same thing I did. Adobe Flash player for Linux works but anyone who has spent much time with it has surely become frustrated. Thus, an easy work around is to use Wine to run the latest version of Firefox for Windows and then install the Windows version of Adobe Flash. This allows one to keep his or her beloved Linux while still enjoying the benefits of a smooth operating Flash player. I must credit PC-BSD for first introducing me to this idea, they have a bundled PBI file that provides this for their users. I am installing on Linux Mint 6, based on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. I used this guide initially.

Download Firefox for Windows from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html
Open a terminal in the directory in which you downloaded the file
Type 'wine "Firefox Setup VER.exe"' where VER is the version of Firefox you downloaded
Run through the installation dialogue
If you are using Mint then you already have an icon created for you under "Wine" in your menu
Open your Windows version of Firefox and navigate to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
Download the Flash player (close Firefox afterward)
Now, open a terminal in the directory where you downloaded the Flash player and type 'wine "install flash player.exe"'
Run through the installation dialogue
Now open up your Windows version of Firefox and test out your flash player! Try http://www.youtube.com/ if you need a test site

That's it! Now you (presumably) have the latest version of Firefox and Adobe Flash Player for Windows working on Linux.

Enjoy!