I’ve included all three texts, and a couple of notes at the bottom regarding choices I made with the hybrid.

Apostle’s Creed

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
    the Maker of heaven and earth,
    and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
    born of the virgin Mary,
    suffered under Pontius Pilate,
    was crucified, dead, and buried;

He descended into hell.

The third day He arose again from the dead;

He ascended into heaven,
    and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
    from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost;
    the holy catholic church;
    the communion of saints;
    the forgiveness of sins;
    the resurrection of the body;
    and the life everlasting.

Amen.

Nicene Creed

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.

Hybrid Creed

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
    the Maker of heaven and earth
    and of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:
    begotten of the Father before all worlds, not made,
    being of one substance with the Father,
    by whom all things were made.

I believe that Jesus Christ was made man,
    conceived by the Holy Spirit
    and born of the virgin Mary.
He was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
    died and was buried;
    he endured the full wrath of God’s punishment for sin (*).
On the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures;
    he ascended into heaven,
    and sits on the right hand of the Father.
He shall come again with glory
    to judge the quick and the dead,
    and his kingdom shall have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
    who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
    who is with them together worshipped and glorified,
    and who spoke by the prophets.

I believe in the holy worldwide (**) church,
    the communion of saints,
    the forgiveness of sins,
    the resurrection of the body,
    and the life everlasting.

Amen.

Notes

(*) The original text “He descended into hell” from the Apostle’s Creed is the subject of much controversy. Personally, I find the scriptural support shaky, and it seems to delve more deeply into mechanistic speculation than is appropriate in a popular creed. I of course do agree with the theology behind the statement, which maintains that Christ bore the full wrath of God’s judgement against sin. I have attempted to capture this with the given phrasing, but I’m quite open to other suggestions.

(**) The original language “catholic church” from the Apostle’s Creed has become ambiguous and slightly confusing in modern times, because of the tendency to omit the word “Roman” when referring to the “Roman Catholic church.” The word “catholic,” when not capitalized and used by itself, simply means “universal” or “of interest to all.” I wanted to avoid using the term “universal,” however, because that word also contains overtones of universalism, which is the belief that eventually all people will be saved and go to heaven regardless of their acceptance of Jesus Christ as savior. Thus, I have decided to use “worldwide” for now, hopefully emphasizing the “all-encompassing” sense of the original word “catholic.” Again, I am of course open to other suggestions.

Observant readers will also note that I omitted the “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God” phrase from the Nicene creed. I do not see the significance of this tautological assertion, and don’t believe it really says anything beyond what the other phrases already communicate. If anyone wishes to argue otherwise, I’m willing to listen.

Otherwise, I believe the hybrid captures all of the points made in both creeds, while presenting with more modern language and better flow than either. If you have thoughts, suggestions, or criticisms, please let me know.

Soli Deo gloria!

Web Browsing

This was perhaps the hardest issue to get clear answers on before I purchased the device. Here’s the real deal: you CAN’T browse anything except Wikipedia on 3G. No Gmail, no Facebook, no wiki besides Wikipedia. Yes, you can browse Wikipedia on 3G, but it’s slow. You CAN browse any website on Wifi. Obviously, you can browse the Amazon Kindle store and purchase books on both 3G and Wifi.

Account Sharing

You can share a Kindle account with multiple devices. This is particularly useful for spouses to avoid paying for two copies of the same book if you both plan to read it on your own device. However, there are caveats.

1. First, the system will synchronize progress across devices unless you manually de-sync that book. This means that without the effort to de-sync, only one person can read the book at a time. You could also manually keep track of your progress, but that seems to defeat part of the purpose of having the book on an electronic device.
2. Subscriptions CAN be shared, but they can only be auto-delivered to a single device. To access issues on any other devices, you have to find it under “Archived Items” and download it manually.

PDF Viewing

You CAN view PDFs. In addition, you can transfer them very easily by setting up a special @kindle.com address. After you set it up, you can just attach the PDF to an email and send it to that address, and the PDF will be delivered to your device. However, this transfer is free ONLY if you do it over Wifi. You can enable a feature that allows you to do it over 3G as well, but that costs a nominal fee for each transfer.

After the PDF is on your device, you can read it just like any other book. However, it will not automatically re-wrap and resize text. Each page in the PDF is resized entirely to the size of the Kindle screen. You can zoom and pan, but this process is tedious and you must zoom back out before moving to the next page. This can make reading PDFs with small fonts painful or impossible.

Newspapers

The newspapers range from $5-$20 per month for a subscription. Most of them provide 14-day trial versions. Generally, the papers I’ve tried do NOT include the comics or classifieds. If you cancel a subscription after being charged for a particular period, your credit card IS refunded the pro-rated amount.

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I got the ad-subsidized version, which means that it was $40 cheaper at retail. It displays ads on the home screen and full-screen while the device is switched off. You can customize the types of ads to a certain extent using the online account manager, and you can also pay $40 to remove the ads permanently.

Conclusion

I have philosophical disagreements with Amazon’s restrictive content licenses (that’s a topic for another day), so I can’t really recommend the Kindle for building an extensive book library, unless you’re only interested in reading the classics (most of which are available for free).

However, the device has proven useful for reading the newspaper ($12/mo for the Washington Post), which saves a lot of paper and doesn’t suffer (in my opinion) from the same content license issues since newspaper articles are pretty much single-consumption goods. It has also proven marginally useful for reading papers as PDFs, although the zoom issue is annoying.

Basically, the hardware has a lot of promise, but the choices made by Amazon have not really endeared the system to me yet. We’ll see how things develop over the next year or two.

I won’t bother writing extensively about this since there is already a wealth of information available. Suffice it to say that I agree with those who are of the opinion that PIPA/SOPA represent a legitimate threat to internet freedom. By adding my blog to the blackout, I hope to lend my voice (as minor as it may be) to support their cause.

The instructions on their OSX build website are quite good, with the exception of the fact that (at least with this version) you have to manually set up some dynamic libraries. This process is described in a bug report in their Trac system. With the links established, the latest alpha (version 8 “Haxāmaniš”) works (albeit without sound) on my iMac. W00t! Kudos to the team, and I await further development with eager anticipation.

WARNING: This is pretty technical.

Any x86 assembly programmer is aware of the PUSHF/POPF instructions. They save and restore the FLAGS register to the top of the stack, respectively. When inserting instrumentation, you will want to do this around every bit of code you insert so as not to perturb the original program. However, this can become quite expensive in terms of CPU time.

Luckily there is a faster alternative if you only care about saving a specific subset of commonly-used flags, specifically OF (overflow), SF (sign), ZF (zero), AF (auxiliary), PF (parity), and CF (carry). This alternative uses the LAHF and SAHF instructions to load and save the flags to AH (the high-order 8 bytes of AX); it also uses SETO to save the overflow bit and an additional trick (described below) to restore it.

Here is the saving sequence:

9f          lahf               ; save lower-order flags
0f 90 c0    seto %al           ; save OF
86 c4       xchg %al, %ah
50          push %eax

And here is the restoring sequence:

58          pop %eax
86 c4       xchg %al, %ah
80 c0 7f    add 0x7f, %al      ; restore OF
9e          sahf               ; restore lower-order flags

The XCHG instructions aren’t strictly necessary unless you want the saved values to reflect the correct byte order of the original FLAGS register. If you’re just saving and restoring the flags around a bit of code and don’t plan to modify those stored flags yourself, you don’t care what byte order they’re saved in.

The OF restore is the only part of this that isn’t entirely straightforward: basically, it performs an in-place 8-bit addition that is designed to overflow only if the overflow flag was set in the EAX-stored value. The addition won’t modify the higher bytes of EAX even if the overflow occurs, so this is safe.

The only other caveat is that these excerpts assume that EAX can be clobbered. If you can’t make this assumption, you can just add an extra push/pop of EAX around these excerpts to save and restore that register as well.

I hope this is helpful to someone besides myself.

• Random players seem to virtually disappear at the higher leagues, reflecting the generally-accepted difficulty of playing all three races well.
• Terran percentages seem to dip in the middle leagues, rising at the higher and lower leagues; this probably reflects the current perceived “over-powered” nature of this race.
• Zerg percentages seem to peak in the middle leagues; it seems like a hard race to play, both at very easy and very difficult levels.
• Protoss player percentages are nearly identical across all leagues, rising just a tad in grandmaster; perhaps it is currently the most balanced race?

Makes me glad to be a Protoss player!

FEDERAL CORPORATIONS:

“Ginnie Mae” (Government National Mortgage Association)
- federal corporation within Dept. of Housing and Urban Development
- split from FNMA (“Fannie Mae”) in 1968
Provides the only mortgage-backed securities formally backed by federal government.

This corporation is formally part of the US federal government.

GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED ENTERPRISES (GSEs):

“Fannie Mae” (Federal National Mortgage Association)
- GSE & public company (OTCBB: FNMA)
- founded 1938 as public company (part of New Deal), became GSE in 1968
Provides mortgage-backed securities.

“Freddie Mac” (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation)
- GSE & public company (OTCBB: FMCC)
- founded 1970 as competition for Fannie Mae
Provides mortgage-backed securities.

Originally traded on the NYSE, these enterprises now operate under the conservatorship of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) as of September 2008. This change was made as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis, and these corporations are now widely viewed as being virtually part of the US federal government.

PUBLIC COMPANIES:

“Sallie Mae” (Student Loan Marketing Corporation)
- public company (NYSE: SLM)
- founded 1972 as GSE, privatized in 2004
Provides college savings accounts and student loans (formerly federal loans through Federal Family Education Loan Program, but now private loans).

“Farmer Mac” (Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation)
- public company (NYSE: AGM)
- founded 1988 by US government
Secondary market for agricultural loans (works with US Dept. of Agriculture).

These companies have (or have had in the past) formal ties to the US federal government, but currently operate as independent entities.

Ultimately, the optimum solution would be some sort of data mining algorithm with a spider to crawl the web for orchestra websites. The algorithm would need to be intelligent enough to find audition postings and to extract the pertinent data (position name, number of rounds, dates, repertoire, etc.). This might end up being a fairly complicated bit of software, so I figured I would try something simpler.

I realized that as long as I was given an orchestra’s “auditions” website URL, I could extract the basic information from the raw HTML using regular expressions. Most websites use formatting to highlight various parts of audition posts, and these can be extracted fairly easily with regular expressions.

So I coded it up in Ruby, and it works fairly well. Since the regular expressions are hardcoded for each website, it’s rather brittle; i.e. if the orchestras change their website format even a little, the tool will no longer work. Also, it generally takes about 15 minutes to custom-craft an appropriate regex for each website. Some websites even require two levels of examination since they post the audition details on a separate page for each position.

Anyway, I’m posting it here to see if anyone else thinks it would be a useful tool. Currently, I’ve added support for 25 U.S. orchestras (mostly the major ones), but I imagine I’d need need to add more to be truly helpful. Unfortunately, maintaining the regular expressions long-term is probably not something that I can realistically devote enough time to. If anyone is familiar with regular expressions and is interested in learning how to maintain the tool, let me know.

Here’s the link: http://freearrow.com/auditions/

Enjoy!