Create and use favicon icon

I used the procedure described in
http://awebfactory.com.ar/node/106 and
http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/favicon.html
to create a favicon. Namely:
Create a 16x16 pixel graphic in xpm format with GIMP
Use tool xpm2wico to create favicon.
Name it favicon.ico and upload to the website home directory.

contrast between New Testament and Old Testament

There are fundamental differences between the ideas of the New Testament and the Old. For example:
Ecclesiasticus 12:4-7

[4] Give to the godly man, but do not help the sinner.
[5] Do good to the humble, but do not give to the ungodly;
hold back his bread, and do not give it to him,
lest by means of it he subdue you;
for you will receive twice as much evil
for all the good which you do to him.
[6] For the Most High also hates sinners
and will inflict punishment on the ungodly.
[7] Give to the good man, but do not help the sinner.

compared to Mt 5:38-48
[38]

"You have heard that it was said, `An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'

[39] But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also;
[40] and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well;
[41] and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
[42] Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you.
[43]

"You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'

[44] But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
[45] so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
[46] For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
[47] And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
[48] You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Another comparison is:
Ecclesiasticus 13: 9:13

[8] Take care not to be led astray,
and not to be humiliated in your feasting.
[9] When a powerful man invites you, be reserved;
and he will invite you the more often.
[10] Do not push forward, lest you be repulsed;
and do not remain at a distance, lest you be forgotten.

The footnote in the Jerusalem Bible says: The words of Jesus in Lk 14:8-10, at first sight similar, are actually in marked contrast to this example of worldly wisdom" :

[7]

Now he told a parable to those who were invited, when he marked how they chose the places of honor, saying to them,

[8] "When you are invited by any one to a marriage feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest a more eminent man than you be invited by him;
[9] and he who invited you both will come and say to you, `Give place to this man,' and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place.
[10] But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, `Friend, go up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you.
[11] For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

Deuterocanonical books and Christmas reference

I have just finished reading the book of Wisdom and am reading Ecclesiasticus. These are not part of the Hebrew Scriptures and I think Ecclesiasticus was originally written in Greek. I believe both are quoted fairly frequently in the liturgy, and I find both very inspiring reading. For example:

Ws 7:22-30 is a poetic praise of wisdom
Ws 18:14-16 the Word of God is personified as the executant of divine judgement. The Christmas liturgy applies this text to the incarnation of the Word.
Si 1:11-25 describes the fruits of the fear of God (fear in the sense of reverence and devoted obedience)

video mashes and DirectX

I saw episode #376 of Call for Help TV, and there were some interesting items:
- GameMaker.nl is a way of using a web tool to make video games.
- test the version of DirectX installed using dxdiag.exe
- create mashes of video, photos and audio using a web tool at Eyespot.com

Modify Thunderbird to work with Internode mail server

Some time ago I was told by tech support at Internode of a modification to the configuration of Thunderbird mail client that is needed to work reliably with their mail server. It is.....

Edit/Account Settings/Outgoing Server (SMTP)/Edit then untick "Use name and password"
Also, "use secure connection?" should be NO

Partitioning for openSUSE / Ubuntu / WinME

I got disks of the latest releases of Ubuntu (6.10) and openSUSE (10.2) and installed them on my Dell PC (along with the Windows ME that came with this PC - why not?) The installation order was Windows, openSUSE and Ubuntu.

When installing openSUSE, I used the included partitioning tool to shrink the Windows partition from 10GB to 4GB, leaving the allocated space for openSUSE the same. This left space for the subsequent installation of Ubuntu.

The resulting partitions are:
hda1 vfat 4GB Windows ME
hda2 extended 18.8GB
hda3 ext3 6GB Ubuntu
hda5 initrdswap 780MB (swap off)
hda6 ext3 7.6GB openSUSE
hda7 ext3 11GB openSUSE (used for /home)
hda8 swap 300MB (use swap)

Install NETGEAR WG311v3 on openSUSE 10.2

Followed
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/showproduct.php?product=624&cat=149
23 Feb 2006 post:

" How I got mine working.
Install NDISWRAPPER using YAST

Copy WG311v3XP.sys, WG311v3.sys, WG311v3.cat, WG311v3.INF, TRANS.TBL,off the driver cd onto HardDisk

Open root shell

Install Driver
ndiswrapper -i WG311v3.INF
ndiswrapper -m
modprobe ndiswrapper

Disable improper Suse configuration in Yast
Network Devices
Delete Netgear entry

Configure the new hardware with Yast
Network Devices
Network Card
Add
Device Type: Wireless
Module Name: ndiswrapper
On next several pages enter your networks information

Reboot"

and 5 March 2006 post:

More info on the WG311 v3 From http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List#N " # Netgear WG311 v3 (Marvell 88w8335 Libertas) * Chipset: Marvell 88w8335 Libertas 54Mbps Wireless Interface * pciid: 11ab:1faa * Driver: Copied WG311v3.INF and WG311v3XP.sys from Netgear CD to local ad hoc directory and ran ndiswrapper 1.2 there. Please see hint at http://linuxcompatible.org/Netgear_WG311v3_WLAN_PCI_Card_with_Debian_Linux_Testing_t33271.html * Other: Running SuSE 10.0 - needed some tweeking in YaST - threw out old card from Network Devices / Network Card configuration and installed new card with Module Name as "ndiswrapper" in Manual Network Card Configuration. Runs 128 bit WEP at 54Mbps.

"

Install NETGEAR WG311v3 on Ubuntu 6.10

Followed
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Ubuntu
and
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Installation
using the Windows drivers on the installation disk.
After configuring the driver using the Ubuntu networking tool, and rebooting, the wireless connection works, with WEP

Verses from Wisdom

Wisdom 3: 1-11
The destiny in eternity for good and bad men
(would be suitable for a requiem Mass)

Wisdom 5
Virtuous men and godless at the judgement

More verses from Proverbs

Some verses from the book of Proverbs which mean much to me are:

Pr 25 11,12
Pr 26 4,5
Pr 26 11
Pr 27 6
Pr 28 23
Pr 29 11
Pr 29 15
Pr 30 7-9

Christmas carols

I don't understand Christmas carols. First of all, it seems to me that a lot of them don't have anything to do with Christmas (eg jingle bells, drummer boy, 12 days of Christmas)

I found a web site which describes the popular English carols:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A832420

and another site which has the words of hundreds of carols:
http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/HTML/The_hymns_and_carols_.htm

There is also a Wikipedia entry for Christmas at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas

According to this, Christmas was banned in England in the 1647 but then became more popular in the 1800's:
"By the 1820s, sectarian tension had eased and British writers began to worry that Christmas was dying out. They imagined Tudor Christmas as a time of heartfelt celebration, and efforts were made to revive the holiday. The book A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens played a major role in reinventing Christmas as a holiday emphasizing family, goodwill, and compassion (as opposed to communal celebration and hedonistic excess)."

According to Wikipedia, similar things happened in America:
"The Puritans of New England disapproved of Christmas and celebration was outlawed in Boston (1659-81). Meanwhile, Virginia and New York celebrated freely. Christmas fell out of favor in the U.S. after the American Revolution, when it was considered an "English custom"."

Maybe this explains why so many English Christmas carols seem to be written in the 1800's, because celebration of Christmas was becoming more popular in England and America at that time.

Personally, my favourite Christmas carol is "Mary's Boy Child", which was sung by Harry Belafonte:
http://my.homewithgod.com/heavenlymidis/Christmas/boychild.html

Verses from Proverbs

Chapters 8 and 9 of Proverbs are the height of Proverbial teaching on wisdom. A very interesting stand alone biblical quote.

A couple of other quotes from Proverbs:

A golden ring in the snout of a pig
is a lovely woman who lacks discretion
(Pr 11:22)

In the eyes of a fool the way he goes is right,
the wise man listens to advice.

The fool shows his displeasure straight away,
the discreet man overlooks the insult.

To tell the truth is to further justice,
a false witness is nothing but deceit.
(Pr 12:15-17)

Selection of psalms

Today I finished reading the book of Psalms. I started reading the Bible from cover to cover in Lent 2006 and I should finish by next Easter. So far I have read the New Testament and I am now starting on the book of Proverbs.

Having read the psalms, I'd like to note down the ones I found most useful and relevant at first reading. These are:
psalm 1 The two ways
psalm 23 The Good Shepherd
psalm 27 In God's company there is no fear
psalm 32 Candid admission of sin
psalm 49 The futility of riches
psalm 51 Miserere
psalm 52 The fate of cynics
psalm 90 The human condition
psalm 102 Prayer in misfortune
psalm 103 God is love
psalm 112 In praise of the virtuous
psalm 119 In praise of the divine Law
psalm 130 From the depths
psalm 131 Childlike trust in God
psalm 133 Brotherly love
psalm 138 Hymn of thanksgiving
psalm 141 Against the attractions of evil
psalm 146 Hymn to the God of help

trial of WYD2008 blog

I have uploaded a video clip to YouTube to try out video blogging. The URL is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zDCD9pzHm8

or embed the video:

Pope Benedict on Islam

The following  comments by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger were published in 1997 in the book "Salt of the Earth" Ignatius Press, San Fransisco, and quoted in
http://www.chiesa.espressonline.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=45084&eng=y

”Shari’a shapes society from beginning to end...”



by Joseph Ratzinger





I think that first we must recognize that Islam is not a uniform
thing. In fact, there is no single authority for all Muslims, and for
this reason dialogue with Islam is always dialogue with certain groups.
No one can speak for Islam as a whole; it has, as it were, no commonly
regarded orthodoxy. And, to prescind from the schism between Sunnis and
Shiites, it also exists in many varieties. There is a noble Islam,
embodied, for example, by the King of Morocco, and there is also the
extremist, terrorist Islam, which, again, one must not identify with
Islam as a whole, which would do it an injustice.


An important point, however, is [...] that the interplay of
society, politics, and religion has a completely difference structure
in Islam as a whole. Today's discussion in the West about the
possibility of Islamic theological faculties, or about the idea of
Islam as a legal entity, presupposes that all religions have basically
the same structure, that they all fit into a democratic system with its
regulations and the possibilities provided by these regulations. In
itself, however, this necessarily contradicts the essence of Islam,
which simply does not have the separation of the political and
religious sphere which Christianity has had from the beginning. The
Koran is a total religious law, which regulates the whole of political
and social life and insists that the whole order of life be Islamic.
Sharia shapes society from beginning to end. In this sense, it can
exploit such partial freedoms as our constitution gives, but it can't
be its final goal to say: Yes, now we too are a body with rights, now
we are present just like the Catholics and the Protestants. In such a
situation, it would not achieve a status consistent with its inner
nature; it would be in alienation from itself.


Islam has a total organization of life that is completely different
from ours; it embraces simply everything. There is a very marked
subordination of woman to man; there is a very tightly knit criminal
law, indeed, a law regulating all areas of life, that is opposed to our
modern ideas about society. One has to have a clear understanding that
it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm
of a pluralistic society. When one represents the situation in those
terms, as often happens today, Islam is defined according to the
Christian model and is not seen as it really is in itself. In this
sense, the question of dialogue with Islam is naturally much more
complicated than, for example, an internal dialogue among Christians.


The consolidation of Islam worldwide is a multifaceted phenomenon.
On the one hand, financial factors play a role here. The financial
power that the Arab countries have attained and that allows them to
build large Mosques everywhere, to guarantee a presence of Muslim
cultural institutes and more things of that sort. But that is certainly
only one factor. The other is an enhanced identity, a new
self-consciousness.


In the cultural situation of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, until the 1960s, the superiority of the Christian countries
was industrially, culturally, politically, and militarily so great that
Islam was really forced into the second rank. Christianity – at any
rate, civilizations with a Christian foundation – could present
themselves as the victorious power in world history. But then the great
moral crisis of the Western world, which appears to be the Christian
world, broke out. In the face of the deep moral contradictions of the
West and of its internal helplessness – which was suddenly opposed by a
new economic power of the Arab countries – the Islamic soul reawakened.
We are somebody too; we know who we are; our religion is holding its
ground; you don't have one any longer.


This is actually the feeling today of the Muslim world: The Western
countries are no longer capable of preaching a message of morality, but
have only know-how to offer the world. The Christian religion has
abdicated; it really no longer exists as a religion; the Christians no
longer have a morality or a faith; all that's left are a few remains of
some modern ideas of enlightenment; we have the religion that stands
the test.


So the Muslims now have the consciousness that in reality Islam has
remained in the end as the more vigorous religion and that they have
something to say to the world, indeed, are the essential religious
force of the future. Before, the shariah and all those things had
already left the scene, in a sense; now there is a new pride. Thus a
new zest, a new intensity about wanting to live Islam has awakened.
This is its great power: We have a moral message that has existed
without interruption since the prophets, and we will tell the world how
to live it, whereas the Christians certainly can't. We must naturally
come to terms with this inner power of Islam, which fascinates even
academic circles.
"

Install OpenOffice 2 in Puppy Linux

I installed Puppy onto the hard disk and followed the following instructions from the Puppy forum to convert the OpenOffice rpm files and install them onto Puppy:

http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=7938&highlight=openoffice

post from:
rarsa
Joined: 29 May 2005
Posts: 1746
Location: Kitchener, Ontario, Canada Posted: Tue May 09, 2006 10:25 pm Post subject: My preferred way for installing OpenOffice in Puppy is the following:

1. Go to the Open Office website and download the latest stable version to an empty folder I prefer to do it outside the pup001 file if you are using one as it is a large install, also make sure that it is not a FAT file system.
2. Extract the file with the following command (use the file name that you downloaded)Code:
tar -xvzf OOo_2.0.2_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz


3. The previous command will extract all the files to a subfolder. Change folders to the RPMS folder under that newly created folder. e.g.Code:
cd cd OOB680_m5_native_packed-1_en-US.9011/RPMS


4. Extract the RPM files with the following command (all one line)Code:
for FILENAME in *.rpm ; do exec rpm2cpio "$FILENAME" | cpio -i -d; done


5. The previous command will create a opt subfolder and under that an openoffice.org2.0 folder. Move that folder to a final location. Please note that it must be a place with enough space such as your /mnt/home folder. e.g.[code]mv opt/openoffice.org2.0 /mnt/home (Paul's note: I actually moved the files to /root )
6. Create a symbolic link (symlink) to the open office executable. e.g. [code]ln -s /mnt/home/oppenoffice.org2.0/program/soffice /root/my-applications/bin/soffice
7. Execute open office by executing soffice

Reading related to worthwhile works

From the Second letter of Timothy (New Jerusalem Bible):


"Turn away from the passions of youth, concentrate on uprightness, faith, love and peace, in union with all those who call on the Lord with a pure heart.Avoid these foolish and undisciplined speculations, understanding that they only give rise to quarrels; and a servant of the Lord must not engage in quarrels, but must be kind to everyone, a good teacher, and patient. He must be gentle when he corrects people who oppose him, in the hope that God may give them a change of mind so that they recognise the truth and come to their senses, escaping the trap of the devil who made them his captives and subjected them to his will."

.....

"Before God and before Christ Jesus who is to be judge of the living and the dead, charge you, in the name of his appearing and of his kingdom:proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it. Refute falsehood, correct error, give encouragement-but do all with patience and with care to instruct. The time is sure to come when people will not accept sound teaching, but their ears will be itching for anything new and they will collect themselves a whole series of teachers according to their own tastes; and then they will shut their ears to the truth and will turn to myths.But you must keep steady all the time; put up with suffering; do the work of preaching the gospel; fulfil the service asked of you."

Blogging plugin for Firefox

On Call For Help TV show (episode 324) I heard about a plug in which speeds up blog posting. It's from
http://performancing.com/firefox
I've installed this and it seems to work well.

The hope of the little match seller

I remember hearing about the tale "The Little Match-Seller" by Hans Christian Andersen:
http://hca.gilead.org.il/li_match.html

Hans Christian Andersen has thoughtful ideas, conveyed by memorable stories. He seems to have a theme that different people can look at the same thing and see it differently. This is obviously true of some of his other tales, such as "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Ugly Duckling", but I think it is also true of "The Little Match-Seller". For some people, this is just a sad and sentimental story. But is it also a story of hope and happiness?

Scarlet and the Black

Watched the film "The Scarlet and the Black" starring Gregory Peck. This is the story, which I had not heard of, about Msgr Hugh O'Flaherty and Colonel Herbert Kappler. Msgr O'Flaherty saved thousands of prisoners duing the German occupation of Rome in the Second World War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_O'Flaherty
http://www.rootsweb.com/~irlker/scarlet.html
http://www.terracetalkireland.com/profiles/hugh.htm
http://www.catholicireland.net/pages/index.php?nd=68&art=490
http://www.answers.com/topic/hugh-o-flaherty