The Linux Kernel Boot Process

A nice little article on what actually happens when the Linux kernel boots, courtesy of Gustavo Duarte.

Online Biblical Language Resources

Since I posted a bunch of embedded Linux links earlier today, I feel like the "theologian" part of the blog is feeling a little anemic. With that in mind, here's some links for online Biblical langauge resources.

• Mechon Mamre includes parallel Hebrew and English texts, grouped according to Torah, Prophets, and Writings. It also includes links to audio files of the passages being read in Hebrew. I've not had the chance to use this very much, but I want to. Hebrew is a wonderful and interesting language, and I don't want what little skill I have with it to atrophy.


• A parallel Hebrew OT is avaialble via the HTML Bible. There is also a parallel Greek NT as well. Oddly enough, the Hebrew includes both Hebrew and transliterated texts, while the Greek only includes transliterated text. Odd.


• There's also online versions of the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew OT into Koine Greek, available from the Bible Database.


• Biblos.com includes a lot of different langage translations online, including four Chinese translations. It also includes a parallel Greek, Hebrew, and Latin translation for both the OT and NT.


• All of which are nice, but my workhorse of online Bibles is the Blue Letter Bible. It's a bit on the slower side, but the amount of data it provides - verse-by-verse links to translations, original text, lexical definitions, commentaries, cross references, and the like - are all presented very nicely.

Embedded Linux Activity

There's a lot going on in the embedded Linux community these days. Just some points of interest:

• There's a new official linux-embedded mailing list, linux-embedded, that's seeing quite a bit of activity. Very encouraging. Lots of participation from the likes of Tim Bird, Mike Frysinger, Matt Mackall, Rob Landley, Wolfgang Denk, Robert Schwebel, Sam Ravnborg, Bill Gatliff, Paul Mundt... if you recognize any of those names, you know this is a list you want to keep track of. To quote Matt Mackall, "Linux-embedded is the place to be, folks. It's intended to be the catch-all list for embedded kernel work."


• Rob Landley's Firmware Linux project is plugging along. Firmware Linux uses qemu to build systems natively under emulation, though version 0.4.0 includes support for using distcc to accelerate a native build by calling out to the cross compiler. Supported platforms include arm, mips, ppc, x86, and x86-64, and Rob's stated goal is to support all the emulation targets that qemu supports. Neat stuff.


• Once again showing that mere mortals can't hope to keep up with his pace, Rob is also working on toybox, a set of standards-compliant command line utilities in a single binary. Rob was involved with busybox , and was the maintainer of that project for a while, so toybox is definitely interesting in light of the "let's start from scratch and do it better" approach he's taking.


• Fedora has several architecture-specific projects going on, including Fedora for ARM, SPARC, and PPC. My former boss-man at TimeSys, Manas Saksena, now works for Marvell, and is apparently involved with the Fedora on ARM project.


• If you've ever built a toolchain using crosstool, you may want to look into crosstool-ng, an attempt to take the ideas behind crosstool and re-implement them in a more user-friendly way.

Aaaaand that's it for today. Enjoy!

From the "What were they thinking?" Files

When I shut down my laptop, there are - inevitably - one or two programs running in the background that do not shut down properly. I haven't investigated what they are, but I suspect they're tray notification applets or something similar. In any case, I get a nice little Windows dialog telling me that the system is trying to shut down those programs, but gosh darn it, they just won't listen! A progress bar slowly fills, and when it reaches 100%, Windows (probably with much regret, and maybe just a little glee) kills off those unruly processes so it can finish shutting down my computer.

This is a momentary annoyance. If I'm waiting for the laptop to shut down, I can just click on the button that says "Go ahead and kill these processes now", and everything is OK. If I'm not waiting, then the timer runs out, and Windows does my dirty work for me.

What got to me as I did this - for the Nth time this morning, when I shut down my laptop to pack it away and head to work - was that this is absolutely insane.

Not the way Windows handles things. That's (shockingly) pragmatic. There's a recognition that not everything will work perfectly, and sometimes, you might need to apply a little brute force to smooth out the rough edges. What annoys me is that somewhere, there are apparently software developers - corporate software developers, folks making and selling software for a living - that have apparently managed to design, implement, build, debug, and test their stuff without ever shutting down their computers.

Because, you know, if they had ever shut down their systems, they would see that their software doesn't work.

What were they thinking?

This is like having a car where, when you turn off the engine, you need to pop the hood and disconnect the battery to finish turning off the radio. I mean, sure, it works, sort of. The car manufacturer has dealt with idiot radio designers long enough that they include a specialized bit of machinery that will even automatically disconnect and reconnect the battery for you so you don't accidentally leave your radio playing all night. So it all works, kind of.

The sloppiness and sloth involved in not even bothering to make sure that your software reacts properly when the computer shuts down is staggering to me. There are guidelines for this kind of stuff. Windows messages to handle. SDK examples galore about how to do it properly. And yet, professional software developers still manage to get it wrong.

I'd like to blame it all on management - the idea that someone, somewhere, decided to ship this software, even though there were some "non-critical" bugs, like, oh, not shutting down properly. Unfortunately, I think it's probably more likely that someone got sloppy, spent a few minutes poking at the problem, and said, "Oh, that's just the way Windows is. It's good enough."

So my annoyance doesn't really come from some software that doesn't shut down properly. It comes from the fact that there's someone, somewhere, in my chosen profession who just doesn't care enough about good software to bother fixing a glaringly obvious problem in their code, even though that's what they're paid to do.

That's just plain disheartening.

Sawdust Shock and Waterbeds for Cows

Via Marginal Revolution, a link to a WSJ story on the economics of sawdust, and... cow waterbeds. No - really.

File system geekery

I find file systems work interesting. This is partly because that's what my current job is, and partly because I am, very honestly, a raging geek.

With that in mind, here's some interesting links for those who care about such things as well:

• BTRFS - a copy on write filesystem for Linux focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration.


• HAMMER - a highly available clustered filesystem being developed for DragonFlyBSD


• LFS - a log structured file system for Linux that supports snapshots.


• POHMELFS - the Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System.

And last but not least, a link to the list of file systems currently available in the Linux kernel.

Being a single-issue voter

In the past, I've seen people make comments about "single-issue voters". Usually something dismissive, along the lines of "You can't just be a single-issue voter, you know."

The problem is... everybody is a single-issue voter, whether they want to admit that or not.

How does the saying go? "Everything is always in the last place you look, because once you find it, you stop looking." I think the negative view of a "single-issue" voter stems from a problem of perception. We like to think of voting as a matter of selecting a candidate, when it is better modeled as a matter of eliminating competing candidates until we're left with a single option.

Face it - the chances that a political candidate will exactly match your views on all significant topics of political discourse is virtually nil. What you are left with, in that case, is an attempt to find the candidate that best matches your values. The logical and almost instinctive way to do this is to decide what issues matter most to you, and then eliminate candidates who don't match your views on that subject. If you have more than one candidate left, then you go on to the next most important issue. Lather, rinse, repeat until you are left with one person, the one who most closely represents your views.

This is where the "single-issue" voter comes from, and it's why we are all "single-issue" voters. When you follow this very natural selection process, you will always have a definite reason for rejecting a candidate. You'll find what you were looking for - a reason to reject - and after you find what you're looking for, you'll stop looking.

"He's pro-abortion."
"She's opposed to gay marriage."
"He supported the war in Iraq."
"She supports legalizing drugs."

So if we're all single-issue voters, what does it mean then when someone explicitly hauls out that title as an accusation? Remember that the process of elimination is personal. You are taking the issues that are important to you, and deciding which candidates to eliminate based on your personal values regarding those issues. That should be enough to provide an accurate translation of the single-issue voter accusation, as follows:

"You're a single-issue voter"

means

"You don't share my values, therefore, you're wrong."

In other words, it's an accusation that clocks in with all the weight of a third-grader's taunt - if that. Yep, I'm a single-issue voter. So are you. So let's stop arguing like a couple of kids on a playground and at least try to act like adults, m'kay?

Power to become the sons of God

"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." - John 1:12-13


These verses caught my eye last week. As I read through the Bible, I am consistently amazed at just how much information is contained in just a few short sentences, particularly in the New Testament. Take Jude, for example - there are 25 verses in the entire book, and I know that I could preach a four part series on the first three verses alone. That's how much gets packed into those first three verses.

The first chapter of the gospel of John is the same way. There is a ton of theology, doctrine, and amazing revelation poured into that chapter. Let's take a look at just these two verses, and you'll see what I mean.

I. "But as many as received him..."

Consider the phrase "as many as". What follows is contingent upon accepting Christ. It isn't someone else's decision, not even God's - it's yours. Anyone who cared to receive Christ, experienced the consequences of that reception. That reception is a matter of faith, receiving him for who he was, the promised Messiah. Most of all, Jesus Christ was definitely a him, not an it. He is described as the living Word earlier in the chapter, and here is described as an individual person. Jesus was God made flesh, and we need to relate to Him and receive Him as a living person, not as a spirit, a thing, or an unknowable entity.

II. "... to them gave he the power to become the sons of God..."

This living Word, this person, this Jesus - he had both the right and the ability to make a specific grant grant of power: the power to become a son of God. The term "power" is a Greek work that can be used to mean privilege, liberty, or right. Those who received Jesus did not gain the potential to become the sons of God; instead, they gained the privilege and right to become the children (sons) of God (Romans 8:15).

III. "...even to them that believe on his name"

This phrase tells us that there is a very specific way to receive Jesus Christ - you have to believe on His name. Jesus' name - His reputation, His authority, His character - are the only way by which we can be saved (Acts 4:12).

Believing means having faith in something, or trusting in the truth of something. You have faith in Jesus' name (reputation, authority, character). You can have all the faith that you want, but unless you put that faith in something, it's useless; and unless you put that faith in Jesus, it's unprofitable. The purpose of that faith is to accept Jesus so we can be reconciled with God. We are sinners, at enmity with God. (Romans 8:7), and the only way we can become sons of God is if we are first reconciled with the Father (Ephesians 2:16). This reconciliation is only possible through Jesus; He is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6)

IV. "Which were born..."

Here, John gets to the gist of the matter: how salvation works, and how it doesn't work. He starts off with three negative examples, telling us what salvation isn't. His introduction in the previous sentence - receiving Jesus based on his name - lays the foundation, and this verse tells us what we should avoid adding to that foundation, no matter how much we're tempted.

First off, he tells us that salvation is not a matter of who you are ("not of blood"). Your family, your nationality, your race - none of that matters to God, and it is not enough to save you.

Secondly, salvation is not a matter of what you do ("nor of the will of the flesh"). No matter what we do, we can't measure up to God's standard of righteousness (Romans 3:23). If we try, we will always fall short.

Thirdly, salvation is not a matter of what others do ("nor of the will of man"). No other man, organization, or other earthly entity can declare you to be saved or unsaved. No other human being in all the world knows the state of your relationship with Jesus Christ except you; and no other human being can establish or disestablish that relationship for you.

Finally, John tells us what salvation is - it is a matter of god ("but of God.") It is God alone who can save (Jonah 2:9). But it is the receiving of Jesus that grants the privilege of salvation by becoming a member of God's family. The conclusion has to be, then, that if God alone can save, and salvation is only accomplished through Jesus... then, obviously, Jesus must be God.

All in all, some pretty amazing stuff. The simplicity of salvation, the certainty of receiving Christ, the adoption of sons, the denial of person, works and organized religion as a means of salvation, and finally, three words that make it obvious that our Savior isn't just a man of God, but is God himself. Wow.

Frayed Knights

For the past year or so, I've been following, commenting, and (for the last month) helping to test Frayed Knights. Developed by Jay Barnson over at Rampant Games, Frayed Knights is roughly an attempt to do the same thing for computer RPGS that Monty Python's The Holy Grail did for serious Arthurian scholarship.

It's funny, it's polished, it's fun, and it's free for the download. Check it out (and look for my name in the credits. Woo-hoo! Mama, I'm famous! :-)

A dainty elvin warrior with an inferiority complex and a hot temper.
A thrill-junky rogue who considers defying death the best alternative to boredom.
A cute but scatterbrained sorceress with destructive tendencies.
A tree-hugging nature-priest who wonders why everyone can't just get along.

Together, they are going to save a kingdom from destruction...

...if they don't kill each other first.


FRAYED KNIGHTS PILOT: The Temple of Pokmor Xang

Now Available!

Quote of the day

Courtesy of Shamus Young at Twenty Sided, as part of a review of Deus Ex: Invisible War:


Bringing about peace by killing everyone who disagrees with you is a solution which scales poorly.