Just the other day Stan pointed out, quite rightly, that reading the Bible can easily take second place to reading other things, like blogs and news feeds.

One solution that may be a good one is to subscribe to the news feed of the Bible Gateway’s Daily Reading plans – that way, while you’re reading all the other stuff each morning, you’ve got a chapter or three of the Bible to read as well. There’s a few different plans to choose from (although for my money it looks like the Old/New Testament plan is the best option).

I tried this for a sum total of two days before my frustrations with it got the better of me.

First, my news reader isn’t a great place to read the Bible. The font isn’t quite right, and all my instincts born of skimming scores of news posts each morning militates against attentive reading. Second, the feed (I assume) is made with the US in mind, so it arrives here at 3pm. That means it’s not fresh each morning. Third, I have good bible software on my machine already.

These aren’t huge problems. But it’s not quite right, and I’m a stickler for getting things working nicely (just in case you hadn’t noticed).

So, I came up with another solution. I’ve got an alarm that goes off in iCal at 6am each morning (that is, before I open my machine, so it actually triggers as soon as I log in). This alarm runs a little app I wrote which works out the passage(s) for the day, and brings them up in Accordance, laid out with the Hebrew and Greek beside the English for good measure, so I can see what’s going on more deeply if I want to. So far, it’s working well.

If you’d like to grab this script and set it up for your machine, keep reading for details.

Perhaps.

I tried out a tool called Prezi for my Issues in Theology seminar yesterday. It’s an interesting concept-shift from linear slide-based tools such as powerpoint. One canvas to indicate overall structure, zoom & rotate, following a path through material… it was fun to make, at least.

My only concern is that for a relatively serious presentation the transitions could well be distracting. Click on the image below and let me know what you think.

Now with extra Greek!

There’s heaps that’s changed this time around.

Biggest news: Greek.

The full functionality of the Hebrew system has now been duplicated in Koine (NT) Greek. Full tables of the regular verb קטל, plus extensive data for a good number of irregular verbs. The parsing tool works for Greek, and tables of the article, nouns (all declensions), pronouns, vowel/consonant contractions, and verbal aspect all come too.

Some relatively minor changes have made it into the Hebrew side:

• You can now change the nomenclature from Qatal/Yiqtol/Wayyiqtol to the more traditional Perfect/Imperfect/Waw Preterite.
• Saving whilst creating new paradigms/entries has been properly disabled (finally), avoiding data loss. This also applies to the Greek editor.

To get the new version, download it (1.0.1, 3.5 MB zipped .app file), or hit Check for updates in the Paradigmatic menu bar. If you like, see the full notes, or read the FAQ.

To keep updated about any posts related to Paradigmatic, subscribe to the following RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/paradigmatic

Otherwise known as a bug.

Turns out that Covenant Eyes, which as I’ve said before is quite a good system, can screw you around a bit.

What it does is log everything you access online to an account on the CE servers. Problem is, if it can’t access the CE mothership to log in, then your internet access is locked down.

Today, it seems that the Covenant Eyes server went down for a while, confirmed by checking on another CE-free computer. Everything on my end was fine – I could even ping google.com – but because Covenant Eyes couldn’t phone home it locked everything up, then proceeded to crash.

Problem was, I had a whole mass of work from UNSW to do at the time. And much of it required internet access.

No, really. Properly required, not ‘I just need to look up smh.com’. Papers, online apps, email correspondence, that sort of thing.

And I couldn’t do anything. I just got a hung system, and then (much) later a zillion pop-ups, all of which need to be clicked on individually, telling me something I already know by looking at the little closed eye icon in the menu bar.

(Open eye, working internet. Shut eye, tubes are closed.)

Surely this is not great behaviour on the part of Covenant Eyes. If the system can’t access home base, can’t it just write to a local file and then sync later on?

In fact, why isn’t this the default behaviour?

SMH today has one of those lists that get thrown together from a bunch of old columns to make a summer/holiday/everyone-else-is-on-leave article.

This one is the ‘10 propheices for the digital millennium‘. Never mind that it’s about the next 10 years – ‘millennium’ sounds much cooler. Much grander.

Some of the thoughts are pretty spot on, in my opinion. Point 7 (Increased importance of technology for the aged) is bang on. I’ve worked a little on projects going on at UNSW along these lines, of remote monitoring and alert systems for elderly and infirm patients who live at home, rather than at an institution. The use technology can help prevent injury, or get a rapid response when something does go wrong. This sort of thing will become increasingly important as the cost of such devices goes down, and technology becomes more and more prevalent.

Other ‘predictions’ are bollocks, to varying degrees.

2. The decline of the PC

This is a consequence of the first prediction [the internet will become the 'supernet']. PCs will not die – indeed, they will become massively more powerful, but they will become only one of many types of computing device. Mobile phones and “thin clients” will be much more popular ways of connecting to the supernet.

Phones, sure. “Thin clients”, however, will not take off. Their utility has been touted for years, but no-one wants to use a computer that isn’t all there. They’re just not very useful.

4. The decline of copyright

Regular readers of this column will know this is a hobbyhorse of mine. Copyright and most intellectual property laws are now an anachronism. Attempts by record companies and film studios and book publishers to stop people copying digital media are doomed to failure.

Technology is forcing big changes to business models.

Not convinced about this one. There’s a difference between copyright, fair-use provisions, and business models. Widely available does not necessarily imply freely available. The laws, and their implementation, might well be anachronistic, but the concepts of protecting the creator’s rights inherent to them are not.

8. The decline of IT as a speciality

A hundred years ago it seems someone predicted that if telephony job opportunities continued to grow at the same rate, within a generation everybody in the world would be a telephone operator. Well, with automatic dialling, everyone is. Somebody else once predicted a similar thing about computer programmers. Today we all program computers, by the very act of using them. There are fewer specialists, but many more generalists.

Such rot. We are not telephone operators. Telstra is. We do not program computers by the very act of using them. Not true, and incredibly so. Programmers are the people who code the programs, not use them. I also like the ‘somebody else once predicted’. Top notch journalism.

The biggest bit of rubbish in this column, however, comes just over half-way through. I guess ’9 predictions about the digital millennium’ isn’t as catchy as ’10 predictions’.

6. The threat from intelligent machines

Look up “The Singularity” in Wikipedia or somewhere. The term, invented by American writers Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, refers to the time in the near future when machines become more intelligent than humans and start replicating themselves. Who then will be the dominant life form on the planet?

You’ve got to be kidding. AI is not a slippery slope.

Looking this term up in ‘Wikipedia or somewhere’, it’s quite easy to see that Kurzweil did not invent the term, Vinge did. And he wrote about it in science fiction. Kurzweil has done a bunch of statistical extrapolation of technological growth to come up with pinpointing the ‘singularity’ at 2045 (outside the purview of this column, it would seem), but he’s not without his critics. Specifically, it’s argued that his analysis is a case of ‘static analysis’, where current trends are simplistically extended into the future… like, for example, telephone operators, or IT specialists.

I’m not sure why I keep expecting the Herald to not print stuff like this, given it comes out with such regularity, and the focus of the online site is so clearly trashy and tabloid.

Bah humbug.

This post is in response to a couple of people asking me how to set up Unicode input on a Mac. If it’s more broadly useful, excellent.

If you’re someone who uses languages with character sets other than Roman (i.e. what this post is written with) with any frequency, then you need to do this. Stop stuffing around with fonts that pretend to show other languages, start writing properly with the right characters.

If you need more convincing, or if you want a brief overview of what the heck Unicode is and why it matters, Joe Weaks has an excellent overview aimed at those who work with the original Biblical languages.

Note: The following instructions are for the Mac. If you use Windows, then you’ll have to look further afield (actually, just in the Control Panel/Language settings).

Step 1:

Go get the Tyndale House Font Kit for Mac. It includes a couple of keyboard maps plus the Cardo Font, which is pretty good (not perfect, but useful nonetheless).

Step 2:

Unzip it.
Drag the Hebrew keyboard layout to Library/Keyboard Layouts.
You don’t need the Greek layout.

Step 3:

Open up System Preferences, select ‘International’, then ‘Input Menu’.

Find the Greek Polytonic Layout, and the HebrewTH layout you just installed. Select them.

Also check the ‘show input menu in menu bar’. This will put a flag up in the menu bar. You can click this flag to select your input source:

I prefer a keyboard shortcut to cycle through these. I’ve set it to be option-space (since I have cmd-space as spotlight, and ctrl-space for quicksilver). Repeatedly hitting this shortcut toggles back and forth between the previously selected keyboard and the current one. Hitting option-shift-space cycles through the list.

This is what my preference window looks like (it might only group the selected layouts together when you open it up next):

Note the Greek Polytonic and HebrewTH keyboard layouts selected along with the Australian one.

How do I use it?

When you’re typing, hit alt-space, ανδ υοθ γετ Γρεεκ ψηαραψτερς. Hit it again, and back to Latin characters. Hit alt-shift-space, and you get Hebrew: חוסת ליכע תהיס. It works pretty well.

Cardo is a nice font that covers the full set of Hebrew and Greek characters, along with the Latin characters. It’s Latin stuff is pretty awful though, so if you want a font that covers everything without needing to toggle between languages, stick to either Times or Helvetica.

Hebrew Vowel and Accent points

The HebrewTH layout, whilst being quite sensibly laid out and easy to use, fails to cover certain oft-used marks, such as composite vowels. To get to these, open up the Character Palette, which is one of the options in the menu when you click on that flag in the menu bar.

If you navigate to the Hebrew section, you’ll be able to insert all manner of accents, vowels, and cantillation marks. Below is an example, with the best approximation to the ‘accent’ marker used by many Hebrew grammars, the ‘ole’ cantillation point:

Voila (Olé!).