Author: Brandon

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My Mac Adventures: Addendum

As readers of this blog probably know, in 2005 I embarked on an ill-fated voyage to create a native Mac version of my Bible software. I was unable to complete my quest and disappointed several of my users who had already switched to Mac and were hoping I would be able to give them SwordSearcher on their own platform.

Well, nothing has changed with regard to development — I won’t be resuming work on the Mac version of SwordSearcher in the foreseeable future as all of the reasons I suspended work on that project still stand — but I received an email from a long-time SwordSearcher user who wanted to share his success at using SwordSearcher on his Mac with Crossover.  Here’s an excerpt:

“And I’m pleased to announce it WORKS! And it actually integrates so well, I wouldn’t even know I was using a mixed setup of Windows and Apple, they BOTH seem native mode in operation, and I use them at the same time.”

Complete details have been posted on the SwordSearcher Mac website.

Additional thought: do software compatibility layers like Crossover for Mac and WINE for Linux make native development irrelevant?

Well, certainly not irrelevant in every case.  But in my case, it certainly reduces the need to expend development energy targeting multiple platforms when Linux and Mac already have excellent “emulation” alternatives. (And yes, I know WINE is not an emulator!)  A single developer like myself, on a project as complex as SwordSearcher, is better off focusing on doing the best on Windows — where almost all the customers are — rather than trying to spend time writing multiple versions of the software, or worse, using cross-platform development tools that invariably result in a “lowest common denominator” feel for the application. And with WINE and Crossover Mac, a viable solution already exists that allows me to continue to focus my efforts on one platform.

Of Populsim, Envy, and Identity

The debate last night showed Edwards and Huckabee getting ready to try to win the presidency on typical class-warfare, envy politics. Edwards is the worst, but he’s only being honest about his goals where his Democrat counterparts are being quiet. But Huckabee isn’t much better. Both are running on the notion that the middle class is being oppressed and that the government needs to “balance” the economy and classes. Central to both of their campaigns is the tenet that the “rich are getting richer” while the poor and middle class pay the price.

However good that is for votes, it’s not reality. As George Will points out:

Economist Stephen Rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of Americans are in that category than in 1979 — because the percentage of Americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. “So,” Rose says, “the entire ‘decline’ of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder.” Even as housing values declined in 2007, the net worth of households increased.

What I think both of these candidates have in common is the recognition that acknowledging prosperity for the country hurts them as politicians. After all, when you’re doing well and know it, who needs a politician to pick someone else’s pocket on your behalf?

Huckabee’s envy, populist politics is more insidious than Edwards’, though.  Whereas Edwards is simply a Marxist and easily identified as such, Huckabee is counting on his identity as a conservative Christian to really ratchet things up for his populist message. Huckabee is running on the platform that he should be the one to reform the federal government in order to facilitate “Christian Duty.”

Bruce Walker writes:

…as a Christian, Huckabee can be a witness to Christian behavior; he can exhort others to themselves become a witness to Christian behavior; but he cannot demand the enslavement of others to do those things which, as a Christian, he feels that he should do. The term “enslavement,” of course, is relative. Americans are comparatively free. But everything that Huckabee feels government should do requires a loss of freedom for every American. Moreover, Huckabee is not just asking for the greater enslavement of Christian Americans, but he is asking for the greater enslavement of all Americans. This is most un-Christian. Does my verdict sound extreme? Substitute “Rome” for “America” and substitute “publican” for “tax dollars.” […] Despite the ways in which Roman power could be used to improve the world, Christ never looked to Rome to bring paradise or earth or even to be the agent of doing good in this world.

Both Huckabee and Edwards share the same basic philosophy of government: use it to make everyone do what you think they should be doing.  Or to at least make everyone pay for those things.

What was really missing in last night’s debates, both Republican and Democrat, was a sense of individuality and freedom as the underpinning of what made our country great. The closest anyone came was Fred Thompson, but the fact is, I just don’t think many people are interested in hearing about personal responsibility (because that is what freedom means).

Global Cooling: Don’t call it a comeback

It’s easy to forget that in the 1970s, climatologists were foretelling the coming of a new ice age.  We’re supposed to forget about that because now the “consensus” is that we’re causing our own warming spell.

But not according to Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, a research scientist for the Oceanology Institute in Russia.  Dr. Sorokhtin points out that climate fluctuations have more to do with external variables, like solar heat, than they do with internal ones like minuscule amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

[…]

“Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man’s influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.”

Migrating a boot partition to a new drive in Windows

I installed a new hard drive on my wife’s machine because she kept running out of space. I didn’t have the time or inclination to do a new Windows XP install, and didn’t want to install the drive as a secondary because that means she would constantly have to redirect where stuff is installed, so I decided to transfer the old drive data to the new drive.

I got her a Western Digital drive, so I figured I’d try using their utility to do the transfer. The Western Digital Data Lifeguard boot CD-ROM utility failed to copy the old partition to the new drive with an unspecified error. (Come on! Cryptic errors are better than nothing!)

So I tried using the GParted LiveCD. It took a long time just to get something visible on the screen, mucking around in interactive boot mode. Finally, I got it to copy the partition to the new disc and resize it. Or so it told me. It took an hour but the target drive was not bootable. I checked all the partition flags and even booted the Windows install CD in recovery mode to rewrite the boot sector (FIXBOOT), and when that didn’t work, the MBR (FIXMBR) and boot sector. It just wouldn’t boot — and no error messages from the BIOS either (how nice).

Finally, I downloaded Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0.

This program is awesome. It is what all low level utilities should be. It just works. I was hesitant to try anything that didn’t run off a boot disc, assuming that I was asking for trouble running a program in Windows to copy the boot partition to a new drive. But it was easy and clear, and apparently Acronis really knows how to make Windows do low-level stuff the right way. It re-booted the system into the UI mode that I’ve only seen chkdsk run in and copied the partition to the new drive, then told me it was done and I could remove the old drive and reconfigure the system to boot from the new drive. And it just worked.

I copied a partition from an 80 gigabyte parallel ATA drive to a 250 gigabyte serial ATA (SATA) drive. The partition was automatically expanded to fill the new space, and I didn’t need to defrag afterwards even though the source drive was pretty fragmented — apparently it does more than just a blind copy of the clusters.

Anyway, this program is awesome and worked perfectly. I just wanted to sing its praises and hope this might help someone else avoid the hassle I went through learning about it.

SwordSearcher 5.2 Released

A new version of SwordSearcher Bible Software is now available: version 5.2.

As I mentioned before, this new version adds “words of Christ in red letters” for the KJV, and also gives the ability to restrict a Bible search to just the words of Christ. The Deluxe study library also adds the following modules:

  • Morrish Bible Dictionary
  • Calvin’s Commentaries
  • Sketches of Jewish Social Life and The Temple: Its Ministry and Services

See the revision history for a complete list of new features.