existdissolve.com
the singularity of being and nothingness
Inerrancy Revisited
Jan 24th
Nearly two years ago (wow…), I wrote an article questioning the usefulness and/or helpfulness of the concept of biblical inerrancy. In this post, I argued that it seems apparent that the doctrine of inerrancy is actually inevitably harmful to a Christian understanding of the place and role of Scripture within theology for it unnaturally weds the doctrine of Scripture to modernistic conceptions of historicity and textual criticism by way of antithesis. In doing so, I concluded, a theology that affirms the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is qualitatively indistinguishable from that which it seeks to overcome in that by necessarily affirming the starting premises of modernistic notions of historicity, biblical inerrancy unwittingly capitulates the legitimacy of said categories while (illogically) arriving at different conclusions. In my understanding, such an approach is ultimately doomed because its entire attempt at substantiation will be (and is, consequently, being) washed away with the next great philosophical paradigm shift.
In the two years since writing about my thoughts on this perspective, I have engaged several who are opposed to my view and assert–nearly above all other things–the absolute necessity of the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture. While I certainly do not wish to call into question More >
Fun with Flash and ActionScript
Jan 8th
My brother recently approached me with an interesting project: He wanted to make a flash movie that would have enable someone to control the mouth movements of a "bobblehead" with keystrokes.
Although I have not done this before, I was certain it would be something fairly easy to do. ActionScript 3's "Keyboard" class has a plethora of functions and methods that allow one to do just about anything with a keyboard and a flash animation.
So here's the breakdown: The animation needed to have five "states": Default, profile, wobble, "ooh" and talk; and each needed to be assigned to a separate key.
Cake.
The first step was to create the background movie. My brother did this in Motion 3, and we set it inside a Movie Clip on the first frame of the flash movie. Next, we defined another movie clip that contained all of the movements for the head "states".
Beyond that, all that was left to do was to define the keyboard actions. The following is the totality of the code:
function doTheBobble(event:KeyboardEvent):void { if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.SPACE) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(2); } if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.LEFT) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(21); } if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.RIGHT) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(31); } if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.UP) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(41); } if(event.keyCode More > Fun with Flash and ActionScript
Jan 8th
My brother recently approached me with an interesting project: He wanted to make a flash movie that would have enable someone to control the mouth movements of a "bobblehead" with keystrokes.
Although I have not done this before, I was certain it would be something fairly easy to do. ActionScript 3's "Keyboard" class has a plethora of functions and methods that allow one to do just about anything with a keyboard and a flash animation.
So here's the breakdown: The animation needed to have five "states": Default, profile, wobble, "ooh" and talk; and each needed to be assigned to a separate key.
Cake.
The first step was to create the background movie. My brother did this in Motion 3, and we set it inside a Movie Clip on the first frame of the flash movie. Next, we defined another movie clip that contained all of the movements for the head "states".
Beyond that, all that was left to do was to define the keyboard actions. The following is the totality of the code:
function doTheBobble(event:KeyboardEvent):void { if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.SPACE) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(2); } if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.LEFT) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(21); } if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.RIGHT) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(31); } if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.UP) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(41); } if(event.keyCode More > Two Levels of Creation…?
Dec 28th
Over the last several weeks, loyal readers of this blog (if any remain…) will note that the focus of the majority of my posts have centered around web application coding techniques. While part of the reason for this is that I have been improving exponentially in my coding abilities over the last several months (not hard when one is going from zero to somethng…), the major impetus for these posts is simply that I post about what I am thinking as well as that to which I am devoting my time. Frankly, while I love theology deeply, I have not been devoting much time to it lately, partly out of necessity, partly out of lethargy.
The last week, however, I have been on vacation and, more importantly, sick. During this time I have had a lot of restless hours to quiet my thinking and devote mental energy to things other than web application code (even though that has still managed to creep in). In these hours of contemplation, I have come across what I believe could be a major diffusor of objections to big bang cosmology (BBC) and evolutionary biology (EB) in re: the relationship of God's activity to the More >
Why It's Important to Read the Docs…
Dec 20th
This morning, I was working on a bit of code for a dynamic directory search that I am building for work. Because I like the paging options that Spry provides, I decided to wire up Spry to ColdFusion to create some datasets. No big deal.
However, I came across an issue I have not encountered with Spry before. Normally, in the master/detail/filter mode of Spry dataset work, I will load a dataset from ColdFusion on page load and then use Spry to filter these results. The filter parameters normally come from the dataset itself.
For example, here's a run of the mill dataset:
var dsPeople = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet("com/getpeople.cfc?method=getPeople, "/directory/person");
This will get all the people in my database from the query results of my ColdFusion component. If I wanted to see a detailed view of one of the people, I would simply pass a Spry dataset value (e.g., '@id') to this dataset, and it would handle it nicely.
While this works fine for a small number of records, what if we're talking about tens of thousands? I'm actually not sure how long it would take for Spry to deal with, say, 10,000 personal information records. However, I suspect it would be an arduous task More >
ColdFusion and Technorati – A Quick Example
Dec 16th
Today, a client of mine (deviantmonk.com ) contacted me and requested that I set up a way for Technorati to be updated when posts are created and updated.
Although I have certainly heard of Technorati , until today I had not had any exposure to everything that it does. One feature is that it acts as a blog aggregator of sorts. Admittedly, it has some nice functionality: besides displaying posts from blogs, it also includes comments and is smart enough to get username and avatar information. The downside is that Technorati–like Google and other content aggregators–only update sites as their bots get to them. Obviously, left to itself, this can take some time, and posts which were made yesterday could not appear for several days (or longer).
Fortunately, Technorati has a nice webservice that allows users to ping the server to alert it to changes to the blog content. Admittedly, the update still takes about 10 minutes, but that is still better than the unacceptable alternative…
So anyway, the webservice is extremely simple. I wrapped up the relevant code in a nice ColdFusion function and simply invoked it on the end of my normal post processing. The enitrety of the code is as follows:
<cffunction More >
First Look at Adobe's Thermo
Dec 12th
I've written at least one post about Adobe Flex, the killer fusion of XML and ActionScripting 3 that makes the development of Rich Internet Applications extremely easy, fast and–let's be honest–extremely sexy. The one drawback of Flex up until now (IMO) is the clunkiness of the design interface. While it is easy to layout and manipulate design items, I have found it a bit tedious to style applications they way I want them.
Well, Adobe has made inroads to solving this issue with the development of their now Labs-interred Thermo. Thermo is basically the designer's Flex. Designers can import Photoshop files (and hopefully Illustrator…) into Thermo and begin creating working examples of functionality and animations in Flex. For example, graphical text boxes can be point-and-click converted to real, manipulateable input boxes; lists of items can be converted to real data-driven lists; and so on.
The purpose of this, of course, is to bring the design and development community closer together. Instead of the designer simply handing a flat PSD file to a developer with illegible notes about what they would like the final product to look like (e.g., transitions), the designer can herself create a mockup of the functionality in Thermo.
But More >
Long Time No Post–And a New Design!
Dec 10th
Wow–it's been almost a month since my last post…not good. Anyway, I've been terribly busy with my new job.
The new job has been somewhat of an adjustment because my job responsibilities have moved beyond simple design and coding: now, I am intimately involved in project planning, of which my greatest responsibility is helping to select and implement a brand-spanking new Content Management System that will service our entire organization.
But it's not been all meetings and research. From time to time, I still get to design and code. In addition to the CMS, we are also launching into a system-wide Intranet. As part of the communications plan, we decided to create a project site where we could blog about the progress of implementation as well as post training videos and other important information. I was fortunate enough to be handed the design of the site, which can be seen above.
For this design, I decided to use some bold colors and design features. I had already designed the logo, so I really wanted to play off the green in it. For a while, I struggled with the overall design, for it just didn't seem like the green and charcoal were doing More >
Adobe AIR Rebranded…Again
Nov 15th
Well, Adobe's AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) must be getting ready for primetime, for today a brand-spanking new logo was unveiled.
For those who don't know, AIR is a cross-platform runtime that allows developers to create web and desktop applications which leverage languages like ActionScript 3, HTML, Javascript, etc.
AIR has had a mildly interesting development. About a year ago, it was pushed in beta as "Apollo" featuring a rocketship-themed logo. Next, it was suddenly switched over to "AIR" with the standard "new" Adobe branding. Today, however, marks the third rebranding in a year–hopefully the last one.
While I'm not wild about the new logo (I like the Apollo one alot better), I think it indicates a more concerted effort on Adobe's part to make AIR a serious tool for developers to consider.
Sadly, I have only developed a single AIR application. I utilized the Flex architecture, but what I developed could have just as easily been completed in standard HTML and Javascript. Hopefully, in the year to come, I will have an opportunity to play around with it a bit more.
Share this:Quickly Falling in Love with Flex
Nov 6th
The last several weeks, readers will note that the majority of my posts have been devoted to AJAX, particluarly Adobe's Spry Framework. My main infatuation is that AJAX allows for clunky page-reload based web activity to be replaced with instant, on-the-fly interaction, not only with constituent portions of the website, but more importantly, with server-side processes (especially databases).
All this time, I have flirted around with Adobe's Flex 2, an incredibly rich platform for developing ActionScript 3.0 applications. While I have played around with it from time to time (basically, when I get a new computre–the trial period is only 30 days), I have not really gotten into significant development…until now.
One of the issues with Flex is that, like javascript, it has not native way to interact with a database. For this, one needs an application server of some kind, or to create myriad XML files to store data. Now I've always known that Flex could integrate nicely with ColdFusion, allowing the developer to access independant ColdFusion components to leverage processing logic and database interaction. However, I did not know how ridiculously simple it was.
So one might wonder what the big deal is. So Flex can easily connect to More >
