The Coding Humanist

I have decided to split blogs and move my biblical studies related work to a new site, ArchaicChristianity.com. The blog is now basically functional and I have some book reviews up. I will continue to blog technical and personal thoughts here on this blog. When my biblical studies work crosses into the world of technology, you will probably see posts in both locations. If there is anything particularly important, I may crosspost that as well. But, in general, I think it is time for me to split my work.

Some of my very nice readers pointed out some issues in my rss feed. I've worked through some of those issues.

That's sorta what I said the other night when I fell off a ladder (while painting) and cracked the bone in my right heel.

As promised several weeks ago, I now have a short review up on Adam Nathan's Windows Presentation Foundation book.

Two other books I've spent some time in but won't review are Return of the King by Tolkein and For One More Day by Mitch Albom. The former was fantastic. I think I like Two Towers better, but the whole trilogy was great. As for the latter, it took me about four chapters to get bored. Oh well. They're not all interesting.

Sometimes you just get really busy. A task I'm on has taken up quite a bit of my time and has beaten down my spirits for the last few weeks. It's really mostly the latter. In every project I've seen there is good code, mediocre code, bad code, and really horrible code. I've spent the last few weeks in some of that really horrible code. It's the kind of code that makes you wonder what drugs they were on when they wrote it. It's the kind of code that makes you want to change careers. It's the kind of code that makes you wonder if Scott Guthrie would have heart attack if he ever saw it.

But it is mostly over now. My spirit is recovering, and I can get back to reading, blogging and side projects.

On that note, I updated my reading list. So I have gotten some reading done...

Last week the guest on DotNetRocks was Steve McConnell, author of Code Complete. I had read about 2/3 of the first edition and liked it, so I wanted to get the new edition and read it. My team lead was nice enough to buy it for me and expense it, so I am reading it now. Here's a thought that is often so true. Many businesses Every business I've worked at since my foray into full-time software development could learn from this:

"In many projects, the only documentation available to programmers is the code itself. Requirements specifications and design documents can go out of date, but the source code is always up to date. Consequently, it's imperative that the source code be of the highest possible quality."

Alas, will the world ever learn? Surely some of you have been somewhere that doesn't have this problem :) 

theWPFblog had some good things to say about a book that I just finished reading. I pretty much concur. I'll have my own review on it up soon.

I finished the last books of January a few days ago. First was J. R. R. Tolkien's The Two Towers. As virtually everyone knows, it seems, that is a great book. The other I finished was another superb book, though not as many know it. Richard Hays' Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul is an excellent treatment of, you guessed it, how Paul uses the Hebrew Scriptures. See the review here, if you are interested.

Though I read both of these a while ago, I also posted a review of Linear B and Related Scripts and of John Stewart's America (The Book).

I finished a few more books. First was Wittgenstein's On Certainty (read review). Second was Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring. So, I updated my reading list. A also added a review for Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

I do think the questions of epistemology that Hume, Wittgenstein et al. cover are very important. But at the same time I can't get beyond a feeling of the uselessness of a highly skeptical epistemology. I cannot argue with much of what Hume says, for example, but despite its correctness much of it does not ring true to human experience. You can say all you want that our sensory perceptions are not as reliable as we actually think they are in observing and parsing reality, but you will not abandon sensory perception or its input. I still plan on digging in this area. I still need to read Kant (I have read a little, but not nearly enough). I imagine my feeling will grow even stronger, but it is good material to be familiar with given my many crazy interests.

I added a couple new pages to the site. At the advice of a friend I am now keeping a running list of everything I read. It can be found here.

Also, a credits page for the images and code I use on the site that do not originate from my own work. It can be found here.

I also added a link to my aStore. I like the idea of the aStore, but navigation is horrible. Not sure what I can do about that other than write my own :)

I am always happy to get new books. For Christmas I have received four:

Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament

The Problem With Evangelical Theology: Testing the Exegetical Foundations of Calvinism, Dispensationalism, And Wesleyanism

The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia

I am continuing my reading of Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and will hopefully finish it soon. I also bought and read The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward - A New Approach. I should be posting a review relatively soon.

Ah yes...you can't beat an increase in the book collection.

So I decided to sign up as an Amazon Associate and also create an aStore.

With the Amazon Associate program you can link to Amazon about books from your site and, if someone buys the book, you get somewhere between 4% and 8.5% commission on the purchase. Not bad.

The aStore is similar. It is a place where you can list and categorize books. If someone buys a book through your aStore, then you get some commission. Both seem like nice programs.

My aStore has books that I have liked in tech and Greek and would recommend, and lists of books that I find interesting but have not yet read.

I like books a lot. It is the main type of adornment in my study. When some people or sad about something they eat ice cream or chocolate. I either eat a steak or buy a book...or both.

I just posted reviews for two books. If you are perhaps interested in a book called The Genius of Language, check it out. I have spoken of Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit before, but my official review is up now and can be read here.

So I was at Half Price Books with the mum and the aunt this last weekend. I picked up a book entitled The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Heiroglyphs to Maya Script by Maurice Pope (amazon - though I got it for only $8 at Half Price Books). I read most of it that Saturday, and finished it up the other day. Overall, great book if you're into this sorta thing.

Subject Matter: How did the braniacs of the world figure out how to translate some of those old, seemingly very obscure, dead languages? How did someone figure out how Egyptian Hieroglyphs work? Or Cunieform? Or Linear B? This book tells the story of those languages, and several more (also including the Cypriot Syllabary, Luvian Hieroglyphic, Carian, and Mayan). The story is told very well and the level of detail is sufficient, though not overbearing. It is a fairly easy read in terms of content. Some knowledge of ancient near-eastern history is helpful, but not necessary.

Make sure you get the revised edition. It contains more languages that the one published a few decades ago.

As far as the materials go, it's nice. It is softcover and has a nice picture on the front. The paper is very heavy and high quality, and there are a lot of good pictures. This book would not have been nearly as good without them. Great asset.

So, which languages did this make me want to learn? First, Linear B, which is mostly just an old Greek script. Then Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Not because I would find it particularly useful. I just think it would make me very cool. How many people do you know that can read glyphs, eh? Next, probably cuneiform.

But, those are going to have to battle it out with my desire to learn Khmer, rekindle Latin, rekindle German, Coptic, relearn Hebrew and Aramaic, and Syriac. Who's going to win? Who knows...