Thought for today

Something to hope for, when there seems to be little hope:

The New Heaven and the New Earth

1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away."

Revelation 21:1-4 (English Standard Version)

My thought for today:

¹⁵Blessed are the people who know the festal shout,
who walk, O LORD, in the light of your face,
¹⁶who exult in your name all the day
and in your righteousness are exalted.
¹⁷For you are the glory of their strength;
by your favor our horn is exalted.

BibleGateway.com Passage Lookup: Psalm 89:15-17 ESV

An awesome concert

Image(088).jpg
Originally uploaded by wesleyt.

I went to see Eisley and Switchfoot last night. I took this picture of Eisley with my phone.

They were excellent. The crowd didn't really get into them, though. The crowd was definitely there for Switchfoot.

Switchfoot was awesome.

Another cool Christian band

Another cool Christian band: Eisley. They're another sibling band, like BarlowGirl. The stuff I've heard so far is nice alternative music. Their album Room Noises is available in iTunes; I'll probably pick it up soon.

I found them on the Bored-Again Christian Podcast, which totally rocks.

A second thought on BarlowGirl. I still like their album Another Journal Entry. I played it for my brother Ryan, whose musical opinion I value highly, as he is quite an accomplished musician. He didn't like it so much. He said it's quite repetitive. I'd add that their writing doesn't sound as mature as other bands: their arrangements are a bit simplistic.

I'm not so fond of their self-titled debut album. It sounds rather immature. But if one takes into account the improvement between the self-titled album and Journal Entry, their next album should be very good indeed. I see promise in them and I wish them the best.

quote of the day

<<
Here's your fortune for today:

May God lift you up and throw you into the sea.

- Matthew 21:21

Nice.
>>
- Just Pete, host of the Bored-Again Christian Podcast
Issue #5

Funny stuff. Excellent Indie Christian Music. Highly recommended.

PHP opinion revisited

I must temper my statement I made yesterday regarding PHP. You see, PHP isn't the only language in which carelessly developed web applications with security holes can be developed.

For instance, yesterday the Mozilla Foundation disclosed that the site spreadfirefox.com was hacked because of an unpatched, accessible version of TWiki was sitting unused and available.

TWiki is written in Perl, my CGI language of choice. It certainly seems that vulnerable apps developed in PHP get more press than vulnerable apps developed in Perl. I suspect that this is because PHP is a relatively young language. As well, an earlier version had a rather serious feature/flaw involving global variables.

My guess is that the mainstream PHP apps I listed yesterday are in wider use and probably are better scrutinized than more obscure Perl apps such as TWiki. In that case, it can be demonstrably said that some PHP apps are more secure than some Perl apps.

So I shouldn't rule out PHP apps on my site any more than I am willing to rule out Perl apps.

I just need to be careful about the apps I install.

temporary home for my weblog

I'll be posting here until I rebuild my site. It may take a few days, as I have many decisions to make. I'll explain.

My home server crashed Sunday evening. Why? Corrupt files. I quickly rebuilt the OS and the email environment.

But I'm taking my time on the web environment. I'm considering a few different weblog systems, content management systems (CMS), and Wikis. I want a Wiki; I've got one at work, and they're quite useful for non-date-specific, unstructured information.

Here's my plan:

No freaking php. As much as I admire the simplicity of the language and some of the beautiful applications built with it -- WordPress, MediaWiki, and TextPattern being good examples -- I've seen too many widely exploited security vulnerabilities.

No Plone. As much as I admire it, it's too complicated for a personal site.

I think I'll stick to Perl-based applications. Python and Ruby haven't been completely ruled out. Zope and its CMF are compelling, but, other than Plone, what Python-based CMSes are there?

index.html will be static, and a portal to the different parts of my site.

/weblog will be my main weblog. My previous weblog, which will be available again, was Movable Type. I'm currently leaning to implementing my new weblog in the latest version of Movable Type as well. Blosxom is my other option.

I'll have a small set of "about me" static pages. I'd like to manage them with a CMS. I was thinking about Bricolage, but it may be too complicated. Maybe I'll just use Mason.

I've no idea yet which wiki I'll use, but I'll have one.

I'll probably also have a site-wide search engine. I've implemented htdig at work, and am quite pleased with the results.

Thoughts?