The following are a few interesting Christian apologetics sites—with video clips—that I have been looking at this week.

Global Vision Channel

The Truth Project

A tip for Linux users: if you use MPlayer to view the footage, you will probably need the following configuration option:

   rtsp-stream-over-tcp=yes

Otherwise, VLC is probably the only F/OSS player currently capable of viewing the streams without any sort of issue. The Firefox addon MediaPlayerConnectivity is also useful.

In an attempt to expedite my thesis work, last month I purchased a new laptop: Dell Inspiron 640m. A high-end MacBook would have been preferable; but unfortunately, the Mac would have been near double the price for the same raw computational power. (Already I miss the keyboard and DVI video output.)

The performance for this model—both in terms of computation and battery life—is quite impressive and makes all of my other machines appear to be obsolete by comparison. Needing a competent workstation for hardware and software design, I removed the preloaded Windows Vista Business and installed Gentoo Linux; and as such, I have written a page of notes with details.

It appears that at least a few other web site developers are taking notice of my custom integration of blogkomm and nanoblogger. This week I received another email requesting information / assistance.

Not having the time nor will power to attempt to further document the internals of my web site, I have opened a few source directories for public access. Hopefully they may be of some use to others.

# nb --version
NanoBlogger 3.3

• NanoBlogger template directory: …/templates/.
• NanoBlogger configuration: …/blog.conf.
• Style sheets: …/css/.

With the start of the new fiscal year, I have been devising a new personal budget—hopefully one more suited to paying off college and expense tracking. The ideal scenario would be an efficient method for budgeting on the computer; something that takes as little time as pen and paper, but computes balances, statistics, and graphs quickly.

Sadly, I believe that most personal finance software is as deserving of my faith (in its reliability) as the old copy of Windows 98 hiding somewhere in the closet. A quick look at a friend's current version of Quicken is enough to remind me that conventional consumer software—once considering bugs, backups, and presentation—can often feel more cumbersome than performing the same task with pen, paper, and mental concentration…

About the same time I was trying to settle between using GNU Cash and just creating a checkbook-like spread sheet in Emacs `ses-mode', I happened upon a command-line finance application that could actually meet the requirements of speed, simplicity, data integrity, and statistical power. Appropriately named `ledger', this seemingly modest application performs everything from checkbook balancing and stocks to forecasting and detailed graphs; all with plain text and the command-line, regular expressions included. Thank you John Wiegley for providing the world with a first quality, well designed, accounting program!

Now using `ledger' regularly, my only regret was losing the spread sheet-like “feel” of rapidly entering data into columns. So I created ledger-indent.el, a small Emacs library that supplements the current CVS version of ledger.el by providing some forced indentation, including a right-justified unitary amount column. Using this code, writing tidy ledger entries is further expedited by simple use of the TAB key.

The following files demonstrate some additional setup of `ledger' with Emacs, including prevention for a tiny cache bug I found in `ledger': …/ledgerrc, …/ledger.sh, …/set-ledger.el.

Today I wrote a small plugin to NanoBlogger for publishing entries written in Emacs Muse markup. Personally, I never found writing NanoBlogger entries with Markdown formatting any quicker that raw HTML; probably due to the lack of an Emacs major mode for Markdown.

The plugin is only tested with Emacs 22.0.91 (cvs) and Muse 3.02.93, but should work with all Emacs versions supported by Muse. The Emacs Muse plugin for NanoBlogger is: .../muse.sh. You will need to read the comments and modify the file accordingly. Two scripts must be created within the nanoblogger installation directory, under plugins/.

For an example of a Muse-formatted blog entry, you can view the original data file for this page: 2006-12-26T22_26_15.txt. To then default to using the muse plugin in NanoBlogger, you can change your default authoring format in blog.conf:

ENTRY_FORMAT="muse"
ARTICLE_FORMAT="muse"

To configure Emacs to automatically enable muse-mode for editing NB entries, use something similar to the following lisp code:

(autoload 'muse-mode "muse-autoloads" nil t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist
             '("[0-9]*-[0-9]*-[0-9T]*_[0-9]*_[0-9]*\\.txt\\'" . muse-mode))