James's Weblog

When I studied on the Cornhill Training Course (1997-8), Chris Green came as a visiting lecturer and took us through the letter of 2 Timothy.

In his presidential address to the July 2023 General Synod, Stephen Cottrell appealed to members of the Synod to debate and disagree not as enemies, but as siblings. On the face of it, this seems such an obvious and charitable standard to hold out, that it's hard to disagree with him. But we need to look more closely at what he's actually asking the Synod to do. This is not quite as smooth-running as it sounds.

I'm currently running a computer that uses Fedora Linux, with the spin that comes with KDE Plasma as the desktop (I happen to prefer that to Gnome).

I wanted a script that will download a desktop wallpaper from the internet, and then set that to be my current wallpaper.

I've said before how valuable I find the writing of David Gooding, particularly on the book of Acts. It turns out his writing on Luke's gospel is just as sharp.

This is one of those posts I'm putting here because I know I'll look for this again, and if it's on my own website I can search and find it quickly. It might also help someone else.

Tucked inside The BHS (Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia) is a small piece of paper, containing the Tabula Accentuum (table of accents). On one side is a list of the accents deployed by the Masoretes when annotating prose, and on the other side the ones they used when annotating poetry.

I wrote a longer post in 2010 that gave some thoughts on the book of Psalms and how we read them.

Today, I've been working on some notes to equip our small group leaders to lead a Bible study in Psalm 31. This comes as part of a series of Bible studies that look at passages that speak on the theme of prayer.

A Bit of History

Back in the day, there was a very small number of mobile phone providers you could use. Orange merged with T-Mobile to become EE. Vodafone has been around for a while. BT Cellnet demerged out of BT to become O2. Three was the newest addition, radically not offering the older 2G connections. (How quaint: 3G is about to be turned off.) So you had 4 choices.

Paul wrote to Timothy: "Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching." (1 Timothy 4:13)

This is a hard post to write, but I feel compelled to put pen to paper (as it were), out of a deep concern for a significant number of my Christian brothers and sisters who minister within the Church of England.

Potential Misunderstandings

Before I get to what I want to say, let me try to articulate why this is hard to write. There are 3 ways this could be misunderstood, and I do not intend any of them.

If you run an application that includes a database, you want to be taking backups regularly. Your backup needs to include tables, views and triggers. It must also include any stored procedures / routines you are using. Otherwise, when you restore from backup, your procedures will be missing.

This article is not about Microsoft SQL Server. This concerns MySQL and its forks MariaDB and Percona.

I've found lots of people asking this question on the web, but not many of the posts I've found have a working answer.