James's Weblog

I'm bookmarking this here for my own future reference.

This is the third in a series of blog posts looking at the decision faced by that Church of England General Synod this week: do they, or do they not, take note of the report by the House of Bishops (GS2055) on human sexuality.

Yesterday, I wrote about the debate before the Church of England's General stood as to whether to take note of the House of Bishops' report into human sexuality.

I explained that the document, and the process that led to it, was all about "good disagreement" - how can traditionalists and progressives get along together without falling out.

How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him. (1 Kings 18:21)

It is logically impossible to tolerate differences of opinion when it comes to the acceptable boundaries of tolerance.

OK - I'll hold my hands up. The title of this post is misleading. I'm not going to give you an ABC on how to secure a Drupal site (maybe another day). I'm responding to a post on the Reseller Club blog entitled How to Secure Your Client's Drupal Website.

There is some good advice in that article, but it's mixed in with some bad advice, and in other parts it's just plain confused. In the hope that it helps people, I'm going to try and untangle things.

A few days back, I set a maths challenge:

Prove that, for arbitrarily large N, the total number of gifts given up to and including day N is

( N (N+1) (N+2) ) / 6

I hope you enjoyed it. It's time for a solution:

While we're in the Christmas season, here's a Christmas-themed maths problem.

The Christmas season is the 12 days from Christmas Day (25th December) until the day before Epiphany (which is 6th January, so the day before is 5th). From that 12 day period comes the song, The Twelve Days of Christmas. Many of you will know it, but for those who don't:

It turns out you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet. Or at least, if the internet gives you some information, use a bit of common sense to check you've been given an answer that feels right, rather than just taking things uncritically and at face value.

I wanted to know how far it was from Jerusalem to the Mediterranean.

So I asked Google:

You what? 1000 miles?

It's Advent, which traditionally has two focii.

The season is about preparing for the coming of Christ. The more obvious half of that is preparing to celebrate Christmas. The other side to it is about the final return of Christ to this world, when he comes to judge the living and the dead, to usher in the new heavens and the new earth, and to free the cosmos from its bondage to decay. What we, slightly mistakenly, call the "second coming". We remind ourselves that it's coming, and we prepare ourselves for it.

I don't normally moan online about things, but I think there's a cautionary tale here that's worth broadcasting.

You see something you can buy online, and you have no way of knowing whether it's a reliable purchase until you try it. In our case, the amount of money lost was small, but some people make much larger purchases, so I think it's worth making sure people are aware of the risks.