Started listening to The Infidel Guy Show, which was referred to me as a good “secular humanist” podcast. It really is good, and there was a time in my faith journey when I would have loved it. As is, I’ll continue to listen to it, because it is interesting, even if it is anti-religious.

A few words on the way the conversation is phrased over there:

• Free Inquiry does not mean atheistic attacks on religion. The impliciation that somehow religious inquiry isn’t “free” is nonsense, as demonstrated by the long and lively theological debate.
• Biblical morality is not limited to literal interpretations of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Jesus worked on the Sabbath, despite scriptural rules against it, so non-literalism is built ito the very source and fabric of Christianity. I know Jews have long ago moved away from that literalism. I can’t speak to Islam, because I just don’t know.
• Intellectual honesty is not limited to those who espouse empiricism. There are intellectually honest and rigorous epistemologies which aren’t based on empiricism.

If the show were to take those suggestions, it would greatly widen the audience of the show, and be much more constructive a conversation.

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I’ve never had the joy of working with Maven directly — every time one of my projects get near it, there’s a developer revolt and we end up hand-rolling the project build/deploy tools through Ant files and shell scripts. This approach is not as painful as it used to be, but it seems like there should exist a business-standard tool that you can drop into your project to do the common build/deployment tasks.

From everyone I hear, though, Maven is not that tool. The refrain is constantly “Good theory, bad implementation”. I couldn’t get a real constructive critique out of it until I stumbled across this blog post:

One of the things that concerns me with Maven is that for a tool whose goal is to be a “project comprehension tool” (giving quick access to Java source, Javadoc and other reports) it’s almost impossible to find the source or get any insight into how Maven is built. Yet so much about Maven is impossible to find, with broken links, missing and out of date documentation, and other hazards running rampant.

I’ve been hunting around for 30+ minutes, trying to find the source to MavenCli. It’s in the maven-core library. Good luck finding a link to that off the Maven web site. Through arcane means and Google searches I eventually stumbled across http://maven.apache.org/ref/ but 2.0.7 is not present there. So they rolled out a release without external documentation? I guess that’s OK when you need a magical incantation to even find the documentation.

Well, I’m getting closer to my answers, but I’m probably still shiv’ed because Maven developer guidelines mandate zero documentation in the source. Or anywhere else. In fact, I believe the maven-fuckyou-plugin exists to strip documentation out of your source and seems to be enabled by default in all the Maven modules.

(Note: This also feeds into my “Agile development does not mean commentless code” rant that I’ve been storing up…)

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Because you believe in the Christian tradition, which affirms the creation of the human race in the image of God…because of that, because, therefore, religious faith is so important, rather than because it is so trivial, therefore you must not constrain others, because faith can only be given freely.

– Jaroslav Pelikan, “Speaking of Faith: The Need for Creeds”

I highly suggest people take a listen to that story. In fact, do all of “Speaking of Faith”. It’s not a Christian program — it’s from Minnesota Public Radio (a.k.a. American Public Media), and carries with it much of that secular flavor — but it is an astoundingly insightful program on how religion impacts people personally.

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Presbyterian Bloggers: Meaning

A nice formulation of the identity crisis churches are having right now. In an effort to be more acceptable to more people, some churches have become de facto social or philanthropic clubs: “recycling money in a religious way”, as the blog puts it. The blog then gets into that a bit more.

Unfortunately, it drops out right when it gets interesting. The question of how to realign the church’s identity and become an active, meaing-filled witness is a tricky one right now.

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There has been a lot of talk recently, with programmers waking up and realizing that with the advent of multicore CPUs, multithreading is here to stay. I’ve just come to the realization that they’re missing the point- it’s not just about the multicores. Even if you take multiprocessing out of the picture, and just look at, say, a web app hitting a database, you run into many of the same problems. Problems that functional programming solves.

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