Yes, the website looks different–I updated a bunch of the pages today and decided to refresh the theme while I was fiddling. Hopefully this theme will be cleaner and easier on the eyes than the old one. If you have display issues with it let me know.
In doing some research about loans and savings accounts, I became confused about all the “Maes” and “Macs” floating around, so I compiled a list that succinctly states their origin, purpose, and current level of entanglement with the US federal government. I hope this proves useful to anyone else who was as confused as I was at first.
My wife recently explained the difficulty involved in keeping track of orchestra auditions. With few central lists or registries, musicians must rely on word-of-mouth and manual website browsing to discover auditions. It sounded like something that computer science could help with, so I wrote a tool to do it automatically and have posted the results on my website.. 
The Document Foundation has released the first production version of LibreOffice. This is a fork of the OpenOffice.org project, one that began several months ago as a response to the longtime development roadblocks posed by the OOo owners (Sun/Oracle). Much of the existing OOo community (Red Hat, Canonical, Google, etc.) has joined with the Document Foundation in the development of LibreOffice and I think it has great potential to become a de facto replacement for OOo. Check it out!
My recent post on “orchestra scoreboards” has provoked a lot of discussion on other blogs, and it has spiked the amount of spam comments to my blog. Thankfully, WordPress has pretty effective comment moderation policies, and it hasn’t been a problem. However, some of the comments are absolutely hilarious, so I figured I’d share a few of them.
The second Humble Indie Bundle was released earlier today. You name your own price, get five DRM-free cross-platform games from independent developers, and some of the proceeds go to charity. Check it out!
My wife is writing an essay on the topic of increasing the relevance of classical orchestra music to modern audiences, and I had an idea of my own: orchestral scoreboards. Read more for details and an explanation of why this is not a crazy idea.
EDIT: This post has been reproduced on a blog by Greg Sandow about the future of classical music. He’s currently an artist-in-residence at the University of Maryland, and he’s writing a book called Rebirth, bits of which are already posted online. Check it out!
I just finished reading The Discipling of Mytra, a “Christian sci-fi” novel by Rich Coffeen. My campus minister thought I might find it interesting (he was aware of it because the author is a pastor in the PCA denomination), and he was quite correct. From a literary perspective, I found the numerous theological diversions to be a bit distracting, and I felt the ending sort of fizzled out. However, from a philosophical perspective, I found it very intriguing. It experiments with many interesting concepts, such as the existence of “Christian AI,” the religious status of cyborgs, the relative importance of pre-evangelism, and idealistic homosexuality, all while communicating an almost overwhelming amount of reformed theology and telling a marginally interesting sci-fi story. If anyone else has read it (or reads it as a result of this post), let me know.
I’ve been working on a simple utility to help me be more efficient and purposeful while programming, and I’ve decided to release it open-source. I’ve created a SourceForge page as well as the official website on this blog. If you’re a programmer, check it out!
The OpenOffice.org community has been reorganized as The Document Foundation, and the software is now tentatively called LibreOffice. Check out their FAQ here. Novell, Google, Red Hat, and Canonical are on board. Missing so far (as far as I can tell) is support from IBM and Oracle. I am glad they’re separating from Oracle, but I really hope they end up with a name that is more accessible than “LibreOffice.”
