All posts by Mark

I'm a full-stack Linux consultant from the UK specializing in high performance systems, DNS and databases. I have also written and lead teams producing a number of web/mobile apps. I'm fluent in English and Turkish.
Computers, Random, Theology

mmmm Welsh leeks

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Came across a really clever idea – a leak detector for IE. It’s amazing how some of these simplist ideas (both to come up with and to implament) are some of the best. Havn’t used IE in many years but still its very cool and should be straightforward to do in moz/konq or whatever other c++ browser people use. Really ought to get back onto this ‘AJAX’ programming circuit – was fascinated by it about 5 years ago but things have moved on rather a lot since then.

Last night was really cool – saw Sam, Lydia, Serena and Emma for a few minutes because they were doing some mad jazz revision thing/party. Then went to the Barn where there was an Irish evening. Never realized the Irish had such weird phrases – out of the four that they said, the only two that I could vaguely understand were “top o’th’man’n tu ya” and “wh’z th’craic?”. Had a good look at Acts 3:11-23 with Yumi, Rena and Felix.

Spent this morning trying to learn to remember historical facts so as to write essays for my Church History exam next week, and also been revising some of the Matthew’s gospel paper… I find that very difficult as well. For some reason all the gospels seem to blur into one in my head – it wasn’t really meant to be like that, otherwise the early church would have accepted one of the “condensed” versions (there were several floating around by about 200ad).

Found an article about removing Bible’s from hospitals for fear that they would a) offend people of other faiths and b) spread the superbug. I think the second option has been disproved and as for the first one – how does just having the offer of being able to read a Bible offend someone? As far as I understand, hospitals stock all sorts of different “holy books” so if you’re a Muslim in hospital it’s no difficulty to ask for a copy of the Qur’an. I’m sure that if Muslims wanted to start up a Gideons type organisation to put copies of the Qur’an by every hospital bed, people really wouldn’t have a problem with it. (However, Muslims might well have a problem with it because they have a much higher respect for the physical copy of the Qur’an than Christians do with the Bible; for example it’s considered very bad to put the Qur’an on the floor). It really is Political Correctness gone mad.

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Greek exam

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Have been revising quite hard the past few days and had a bit of Greek revision last night. Exam this morning went quite well – some of the stuff was a bit hard to translate as it had lots of irregular aorist verbs but nothing amazingly difficult.. Finished in 2h and then spent the rest of the time reading through the dictionary we were given.

Bumped into Dave Mac in Sidney and had a good chat with him – first time I’ve really seen him all term. Then bumped into Emma which was cool just got back from having lunch with her 🙂

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Stupid things

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Really, what is it with people doing stupid things which anyone with more than a pinch of common sense would realize that they would probably get killed by? I just read about a 19-yearold from Manchester who tried to make explosives in his garage. This follows hot on the trail of the two lightsabre fighters in Essex who it seems got strip-light tubes, filled them with petrol and then attempted to light them and film the resulting fight. Needless to say they didn’t get much further than the lighting stage. Is the human race doomed to self-destruction? Fortunately these people didn’t achieve Darwin Awards yet (or perhaps unfortunately given they’re still in the ‘gene pool’…)

Computers, Random, Science

Sunday and Monday

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Sunday was good fun. Got about 2 or 3 hours sleep on Saturday night for no apparent reason – I’d allowed myself about 7 hours to sleep but my body just didn’t want to. Went to church on Sunday morning and met up with Jim from Oxford which was good – hadn’t seen him in ages, and won’t see him all summer due to China. We then went to Jesus Green where the 30 or so Eden people were joined by the Holy Trinity student lunch, a few random StAG guys and the CLC posse were over the other side of the park. Thanks to Widge we had a BBQ though which was the highlight. There was a (i think 3-way) football match, some “French” cricket, frisby, rounders and then some ultimate frisby at the end (Jesus college vs). Then went home to have a shower and back to church for the evening service which was Marvin speaking on Jude 17-25.

Monday was very lazy – listened to some more NTW lectures and read through some essays I wrote. Started learning a bit of Haskell due to boredom and then started doing a mock test. I’d just got 1/4 of the way through when Ellie phoned me asking if I wanted to go to a jog; the former being worse than anything i accepted. Was really nice and sunny and we ran along the river to Fen Ditton. Took about an hour and 10 min but we did walk quite a bit. I really ought to do more jogging – a healthy body leads to a healthy mind and all that.

Found some cool links:
An ‘Open source’ Cola recipe… looks somewhat dangerous though, and cola is pretty minging.
A really sick piece of modern art which is a dead frog in formaldehyde spliced open with a web server and electrodes which lets you trigger its legs to jump, ovr the internet…
A DIY laser which is basically a spark-gap in the air which uses the nitrogen to generate the laser beam. Might give this one a try sometime.

Theology

Lazy days

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It’s been another lazy day of revision and boredom (although the two usually go togeather). Read quite a lot of a thematic commentary on Matthew’s gospel by J. D. Kingsbury and also listened to one of the Hulsian lectures which N. T. Wright gave last year, the title of which was “Paul and Justification”. The talk I listened to was about Paul’s political scene and whether he was a political thinker. At some points, NTW seems to be reading too much into the text but I think on the broad picture he’s right that there are some resonances in the text which would have reminded people that “Jesus is Lord and so Caesar isn’t”. Not too sure on his political reading of Romans but I do agree that the Romans 13 section about obeying the governing authorities is actually bringing the rulers down a peg in terms of there is a higher king than them.

Found the following two pictures quite funny (click for bigger pictures):
funny/2source.jpg funny/church_stand_up.jpg

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Thursday night and Friday

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The Barn last night was very good – saw Mehmet for the first time in ages and we had a ‘mini Olympics’ night which was good fun for all involved. Harry’s today was similarly good, many people turned up and we went to Rachel E’s afterwards for toasties and chat – maybe 20 people went and it was great to get to know people better.

The rest of the day was nice – it was very hot here, perhaps 25 to 28 degrees and the wind was also very hot. I spent the day until 4:30 locked in my room trying to do some work, and I succeeded in the main part although not as much work as I’d have liked to. After Harry’s, I went into Sidney to check my mail and went to see Ellie to have a catch-up. We ended up going on a nice walk and chat until about midnight. Cambridge is all about just randomly meeting up with people and getting to know them better it’s such a privilege to be here.

Jim should be coming here from Oxford tomorrow, as is Rosalind (from London during her half-term) so I’ll probably be busy the next few days just seeing people and socialising. Really ought to start getting down to serious revision soon as my exams are only a few days away… First is my Greek on Thursday.

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My day so far…

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It’s been another lazy day of revision… Got up, read my Bible, went to the last lecture of the year about Islam! Then came home and listened to some lectures by Tom Wright and went to do Bible study with my mate Kim. Anyway, I really ought to get down to do some more work now…

Theology

Hissop

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I went to Christian Union tonight for the first time this term. We looked at Psalm 51 which is one of my favourite Psalms and very clear about forgiveness and how we should live as the people of God. It’s amazing how you notice something new every time you come to the Bible, and this time I noticed that David talks about being cleansed to be whiter than white by Hissop. Hissop was a type of tree in Israel and it’s quite important throughout the Bible as a sign of forgiveness – in the Passover (Exodus 12) the Israelites are instructed to put the blood of the lamb on their door posts using a branch of Hissop so that the Angel of Death might pass over their houses. In John 19:29 as Jesus is dying on the cross, someone gets a sponge of wine-vinegar and offers it to him on a Hissop stick. It’s also used throughout Leviticus 14 law about temple sacrifices, specifically to do with the blood of the animal which has been killed.

It’s really amazing to see how these really random themes just permeate all through the Bible – there’s really no chance to my mind that they could have been invented by the human authors of the Bible.

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Last APU :-(

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It was the last APU cafe last night. It’s been a good year, we’ve seen it grow from one or two internationals to have at its peak about 20. We had a good party at Briony’s, Richard baked some potato bread and Karunashur made some wonderful Indian food. Briony made some amazing cookies too. I started my “trying to get to bed early” programme and managed just past midnight.